The optimism and hype from the early 1990's has been replaced by a realization that building digital libraries will be a difficult, expensive, and long-term effort (Lynch and Garcia-Molina, 1995 as cited in Cleveland, 1998).

Creating effective digital libraries poses serious challenges. The integration of digital media into traditional collections will not be straightforward, like previous new media (e.g., video and audio tapes), because of the unique nature of digital information--it is less fixed, easily copied, and remotely accessible by multiple users simultaneously (Cleveland, 1998).

Some issues of the development of digital libraries are outlined by Cleveland (1998) as

• technical architectures,
• the building of digital collections,
• digitization,
• metadata,
• naming, identifiers, and persistence,
• copyright/rights management and
• preservation