Simply put a digital library system is a network application software platform that provides digital content to authorized users.  The source of the digital content can be digital files that your company or institution owns, free or out of copyright material that you have collected or it can be third party content for which your company has been given the license to distribute to your employees and other users.

Digital libraries work in browser-based software platform where all your digital resources are stored on your server(s) and your authorized users can gain access to the resources using computers connected to the Internet or local network. 

Your digital library software organizes your resources through collections, which are in plain terms a collection of digital content.  A typical digital library system contains several collections, individually organized—though they bear a strong family resemblance. Easily maintained, collections can be augmented and rebuilt automatically. 

The digital library system allows your users to locate these resources through a variety of ways - you can search for particular words that appear in the text, or within a section of a document or you can specify key words for your resources which can be used to search for the documents. You can also browse documents by title, by subject or by author.  Subjects are represented by bookshelves. Where appropriate, documents come complete with a table of contents: you can click on a chapter or subsection to open it, expand the full table of contents, or expand the full document into your browser window (useful for printing).

On the front page of each collection is a statement of its purpose and coverage, and an explanation of how the collection is organized. Most collections can be accessed by both searching and browsing. When searching, the software looks through the entire text of all documents in the collection (this is called “full-text search”). In most collections the user can choose between indexes built from different parts of the documents. Some collections have an index of full documents, an index of paragraphs, and an index of titles, each of which can be searched for particular words or phrases. Using these you can find all documents that contain a particular set of words (the words may be scattered far and wide throughout the document), or all paragraphs that contain the set of words (which must all appear in the same paragraph), or all documents whose titles contain the words (the words must all appear in the document’s title). There might be other indexes, perhaps an index of sections, and an index of section headings.

Browsing involves lists that the user can examine: lists of authors, lists of titles, lists of dates, hierarchical classification structures, and so on. Different collections offer different browsing facilities.

With proper design and implementation, digital libraries can act as the core framework of a companies information highway, which provides an integrated solution for knowledge management, knowledge search, learning and knowledge popularization.   Specifically, educational institutions of all level can employ digital libraries to provide books, reference materials, lecture notes and other resources to their students.