E-research: A new genre of digital library services

The pervasive use of Internet and ICT (information and communication technology) in many learning and research settings has greatly enhanced the phenomenal growth of a wide array of digital applications and utilization to expand significantly throughout the chain of eLTR (e-learning, e-teaching, and e-research) arenas. The DL (digital library) primarily benefited the most from the powerful capabilities of the Web to enhance friendly search and retrieval across multidisciplinary domains to promote e-information dissemination within networked environment. Concomitantly, scholarly use of Internet has facilitated the Web-based research (e-research), which furnished a platform for developing innovative research practices, modelling, simulation, and quality test within virtual laboratory environment. Should the DL view e-research as a new domain of information service? Many studies on using the Web for scholarly research have provided strong evidence to consider e-research as a new challenging domain for DL services, since the DLs have become more obligated to answer the growing information needs of the e-research community over 24×7. Integrating DL resources with e-research process has therefore, become, a highly urgent necessity in e-learning environment. This work sketches the potential of DL e-services for actively endorsing e-research activities. Conceptual model representing interoperability between the two e-domains is presented.