The information available in the Internet could be more useful if in addition to its accessibility, it would be organized as users require. Internet users can feel lost if they can not find information management and retrieval services like those provided by traditional libraries. In the belief that the use of the traditional library metaphor for documents over the Internet will improve their management, we have developed a model for digital libraries called the VILMA model, and a prototype that implements it. VILMA's user interface utilizes a spatial metaphor where the typical elements (such as books, shelves, etc.) are presented in a three-dimensional world. Moreover, VILMA is composed of the three main elements of a traditional library: information entities, metadata, and processes. In VILMA, the information entities that form the library's collection, are documents in the Internet, and the metadata are those required by the Dublin Core Metadata Set. There are two types of processes in VILMA: public, which are all those related to the user, and technical, that have to do with traditional librarian's tasks. Public processes are subscription, identification, searching (analytical, expert, accidental) and customising, while technical processes are selection of documents, acquisition, classification and cataloguing, indexing, maintenance and notification. In this paper, we will present the VILMA model, and its prototype.