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Digital Library 2.0: Source of Knowledge and Research Collaboration Platform

Digital libraries are frequently treated just as a new method of storage of digitized artifacts, with all consequences of transferring long-established ways of dealing with physical objects into the digital world. Such attitude improves availability, but often neglects other opportunities offered by global and immediate access, virtuality and linking ― as easy as never before. The article presents the idea of transforming a conventional digital library into knowledge source and research collaboration platform, facilitating content augmentation, interpretation and co-operation of geographically distributed researchers representing different academic fields. This concept has been verified by the process of extending descriptions stored in thematic Digital Library of Polish and Poland-related Ephemeral Prints from the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries with extended item-associated information provided by historians, philologists, librarians and computer scientists. It resulted in associating the customary fixed metadata and digitized content with historical comments, mini-dictionaries of foreign interjections or explanation of less-known background details.