Multimedia streaming is an important component of many Internet applications such as distance learning, digital libraries, video conferencing, home shopping, and video-on-demand. We discussed video-on-demand in previous lesson. In this lesson, we will focus on digital libraries in more details. Digital libraries are an important source of many information queries and research areas. Universal access is an important functionality of digital libraries. Since digital libraries are designed to serve large numbers of diverse users, they need to accommodate the special needs of the users, constraints of the client devices, and bandwidth conditions. To provide universal access, the digital libraries need to either store and deliver different versions of the content or perform media conversion before content delivery.
What constitutes a digital library differs depending upon the research community that is describing it. For example:
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from an information retrieval point of view, it is a large database |
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for people who work on hypertext technology, it is one particular application of hypertext methods |
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for those working in wide-area information delivery, it is an application of the Web |
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and for library science, it is another step in the continuing automation of libraries. |