DIGITAL LIBRARY, e-LIBRARY AND VIRTUAL LIBRARY

Note Submitted by Prof.K.Nageshwar MLC to Govt. of Andhrapradesh, India.

Digital libraries have become a core ingredient, a collective memory of the educational environments of today and of the future. Hybrid libraries have already become widely used components of many universities around the world.

In several countries (USA, UK, Germany) a national digital library for education in science, engineering, and technology is being developed as an important ingredient of the national educational infrastructure. While the development of a Digital library is a continuous process of collecting, classifying, conceptualizing, and using information, the process is paralleled by rapid technological advancements. Together, these  developments lead to the evolution of Digital library frameworks and methodologies for their application. Digital libraries in each country are dependent on the language used by it’s educational community, the national culture, and the national traditions in education. Digital libraries are becoming a core ingredient, a collective memory, of the educational environments (global, national, institution or domain-oriented) of today and of the future.

what a digital library is, in particular, how it might differ on the one hand from a conventional bricks-and-mortar library and from the World Wide Web – on the other. What major challenges would be encountered when making a digital library with the same contents?

To digitise an entire library would be a formidable undertaking. One challenge would be the sheer magnitude of the task of converting all the library’s contents into digital form by scanning them into the computer. Scanning books is much easier if they can be taken apart by removing their spines, but in this application the job would probably have to be done non-destructively. Dealing with old and fragile material would be particularly time-consuming. But an over-riding problem would be the legality of the whole enterprise. Typically only a small percentage (if any) of a library’s content is out of copyright and it would be impossible for the library to obtain permission to digitise from all copyright holders.

• How would library users benefit?

Making the digital library available over the web would open up readership to a host of potential new users. A major advantage for existing library users would be convenience of remote access – from workplace or home, if they had an Internet connection, or perhaps from branch libraries.

• In what ways would digital library differ from the World Wide Web?

The digital libraries are focused collections of information that has been carefully selected and organized, in contrast to the web in which anyone can add information and organization is haphazard. Digital libraries have boundaries; the web does not. Digital libraries can bring information to people who lack access to the web.

Digital libraries present many exciting new opportunities. They can incorporate a huge variety of different content types. While one naturally thinks first of textual documents, upon reflection digital libraries can contain any media type – for example, images, maps, audio, video, even virtual manipulatives. So can conventional libraries, of course, but it is more difficult for them because of physical packaging and different viewing requirements for library users. Digital libraries are viewed on general-purpose computers, which can present all kinds of media in a

relatively uniform way. Moreover, they are not restricted to conventional media: digital libraries can include raw data and even interactive software modules.

A digital library is the same as a traditional library, or a traditional information retrieval system, except that the material is represented digitally.

• A library that encodes journals, books, and information into a digital format.

• A collection of texts, images, etc., encoded so as to be stored, retrieved, and read by computer.

• A collection of digital representations of information content, along with hardware, software, and personnel to  support the functions of a traditional library plus knowledge worker operations like searching, browsing, and navigation.

• An integrated set of services for capturing, cataloguing, storing, searching, protecting, and retrieving information.

Digital Library notes the possibility of capturing dynamically changing information, something a conventional library cannot do.

• A collection of a very large number of digital objects, comprising all types of material and media, that are stored in distributed information repositories and accessed through computer networks.

• A large collection of information that has been stored in digital form. A digital library can include documents, images, sounds, and information gathered from ongoing events (e.g. continuous pictures from a weather satellite).

• Digital libraries can include reference material or resources accessible through the World Wide Web. Digitised portions of a library’s collection or original material produced for the web can also be included in a digital library.

A related term is “virtual library”. While this might be considered synonymous with “digital library” in that both emphasize the intangible nature of the material stored, it is more often used to denote a portal to information that is available electronically elsewhere. Digital libraries are especially critical in developing countries. One reason for this is that traditional sources of information – for example, books – are often hard to obtain there, and digital libraries make it possible for large numbers of people to access them at a potentially low replication cost. Another is that web access in developing countries is typically low, widening the knowledge gap between the developed and developing world. Digital library technology can ameliorate this, because – despite many people’s assumptions to the contrary – it does not have to depend on the Internet for distribution.

Developing countries are eager consumers of digital libraries. But it is crucial for sustained development that these countries are not relegated to becoming “read-only cultures” in the digital revolution. One way to ensure this is by participating in producing information collections. If you live in a developing country, this course will help by showing the question was whether the World Wide Web is a digital library. The web lacks two crucial elements: organization and selectivity. A library is an organized collection, organized according to some overall principles and not as a tangled web of links. And the information in a library has been selected according to some criteria, whether explicitly articulated or not.  Libraries are “curated” collections, literally ones that are “taken care of” by some guiding body, such as Librarian. No one takes care of the web. But since the early days of the web, people have tried to bring order to it and make it easier to find things by developing “search engines.”

• It is easier to update a digital library with new material;

• Content can be easily presented in many different formats (images, maps, audio, video, data series, etc.);

• Content is more easily accessible: it is easier to distribute new data over computer networks than to update paper copies;

• Content can be published: We can easily create our own content and publish it in a digital library.

• Possibility of resource reuse: We can share resources in ways that are not practical with paper-based materials;

• Ease of integration: as work will be in digital form it becomes easier to incorporate authentic content into our own work.

To establish a Digital Library (after technology is installed as software components), serious efforts are required to collect (harvest, integrate, gather, register) the digital resources, and to maintain and continuously extend them.Governance,maintenance, and a community must be arranged around the Digital Library to make it sustainable.

Source : UNESCO Reports