View of DIGITIZATION OF LIBRARIES: AN OVERVIEW

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ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING

Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal IMPACT FACTOR: 2.104(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) UGC APPROVED NO. 48767

Vol. 04, Issue 03,March 2019 Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE

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DIGITIZATION OF LIBRARIES: AN OVERVIEW Dr. Raj Kumar Singh

Assistant Professor-Library,

L S Govt. P.G. College, Adalhat, Mirzapur, UP, India

Abstract - In this paper I would explain about establishing a process and a supporting best architecture for the digitalized library of India. With the development of digital information and a knowledge society, libraries are changing their role from document provider to information provider. The emerging trends in digital technologies and their applicability to information handling activities added new challenges to knowledge professionals. They have to foresee their continuing to the development of informed citizens, incorporating and utilizing new technologies that enhance their endeavors. At the same time they should strike a balance between the traditional role and the new roles. The need of the hour is to provide authentic information in split second. The Digital Library project was started with a vision of digitizing books, map, educational video and making them available online, in a searchable and browse able from the digitization of the books takes place at geographically distributed locations. I would like also to discuss the basic problems in detail and the process and workflow that are established to solve them; I will expose the architecture of the project that supports the smooth implementation of the digitization.

1 INTRODUCTION

A digital library is an automated or electronic library, where information is recorded, store, retrieved and disseminated in the digital form. Digital media has emerged as one of the most powerful media of information. Librarians exploit the facilities of information technology with the aim of sharing their resources for providing right information to the right user at the right time. The user can access information from anywhere, anytime and information can be stored any where across the world.

Digitization of information basically means the process of converting paper documents such as text, graphics etc. into digital image, which can be made accessible through electronic network. We can say digitization means process which is meant to eliminate paperwork and make a transition to a paperless environment with the help of software technology.

2 DIGITAL LIBRARY

According to Berkeley Digital Library project, university of California “the digital library will be a collection of distributed information sources, producers of information will make it available and consumers will find it perhaps through the help of automated agents.”

According to Lesk, “A digital library is a collection of information that is both digitized and organized and which

offers capabilities beyond those of the traditional library.”

K. C. Gupta states that, “Generally people name such an information access point a digital library or information centre where the information recorded on electronic media is stored and retrieved using the electronic devices.”

The digital library to be an electronic collection of real or virtual resources, which may also be available elsewhere. A digital library may allow either online or offline access to the elements it organizes and houses, and may include multimedia as well as multilingual data. These resources must be whole works, with which humans can have complete cognitive or affective engagement. Although, accessible online, a digital library is not identical to a website or a portal. However, while portals, specialized websites and search engines cover a wide range of subject areas, digital libraries are more narrowly focused around one or a specific group of disciplines.

2.1 Digitization of Libraries

Libraries comprise a major group within the cluster of institutions under the Department of Culture, Government of India. The Department is directly or indirectly involved in the administration, maintenance and development of some of the most important libraries in India. The National Library, Kolkata, the Delhi

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2 Public Library, Delhi, Connemara Public Library, Chennai and State Central Library, Mumbai which are depositories of the printed cultural heritage of India are either fully or partially supported by the department.

2.2 Proposals by Government of India Today many departments of India have taken the project of digitization of library.

Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Department of Information Technology (DIT) and the Department of Culture (DOC), government of India took note of the situation and initiated the Digital Library Projects in India in right earnest. DSIR funded the project of Digital Library of Traditional Heritage knowledge, DIT initiated the Digital Library of India and the DOC supported the Digital Library activities for the different places in India.

2.3 Constant Digitization is the necessity of the Digital Era

Today is the large- scale digitization of libraries in India is going around and it is the need of the time as online search is to make locating the relevant information inside of books for more reliable and much easier. “In the modern day’s information society, literacy means computer literacy.” Even the marginally literate people will not be able to survive and complete in the complete field. With the exponential has emerged as a boon to the academic community by facilitating access to a treasure of information on the web, which can be used for study, teaching and research. It is a sources of current information generated all over the world. For the publication of the research output also the academic community can effectively use internet. The academics use the Internet for knowing a subject and updating their knowledge as well. The researcher can obtain the related literature in their field of study by browsing the internet.

The internet is widely used in the teaching- learning process and for career search imparting knowledge. However, to utilize potentials of internet to its maximum, it is necessary to make the academics well versed in using it. Where content matches need the e- book can support the academic mission effectively, saving time and adding value as a

collective online reference resource rather than a set of individual titles. There is a definite synergy with e- learning. For libraries they require considerable staffing input but open up possibilities; for dynamic and cost effective collection management. New product, technologies and opportunities continue to emerge, however, and the future for e- books looks bright especially if easier on- screen reading and more flexible, customer- oriented, licensing can be realized.

3 REQUIREMENTS OF DIGITAL LIBRARY

A. Basic Components of Digital Library

Some essential hardware equipment bare to be required are mentioned here:

1. Adequate no. of PCs connected to high speed local networks

2. Servers and Storage devices like CD- ROM

3. Library Automation Software 4. Sheet Feeders

5. Scanners (to scan resources available in physical form)

6. Search engines to provide access to information

7. Information resources 8. Digital Camera

9. Well trained manpower B. Software for Digitization

The creation of digital libraries, software is the key element in the construction of a Knowledge Repository Digital Libraries provides an integrated set of services for capturing, cataloguing, storing searching, protecting and retrieving information, which provide a coherent organization and convenient access to typically large amounts of digital information.

Some of the important digital library software is mentioned here

 Archidede

 DSpace

 E- Prints

 Fedora

 Greenstone etc.

 There are five stages in developing a digital library using GSDL:

 Stage1- Collect information

 Stage 2- Describe the data

 Configure the collection

 Build the collection

 View the collection

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3 In above stages Greenstone constructs full- text indexes from the document text and from metadata elements such as title and author.

Indexes can be searched for particular words, Boolean combinations or phrases and results are ranked by relevance or sorted by a metadata element.

3.1 Major Characteristics of Digital Library:

 To overcome the geographical boundaries to access the information resources.

 To improve library operation.

 To enhance advanced search, access and retrieval of information.

 To support varies library functions.

 To provide network facilities.

 To provide user friendly interface.

 Data can be access by all type of uses at all level retrieving all kind of information.

 Information is provided in a large amount than it possible to physically acquired and maintained as compare to traditional library.

 One copy of document could be viewed by many numbers of people simultaneously.

3.2 Problems and Challenges:

There are some problems in digital library development teams face while they embark on the digital library development as well as during the progress phase.

Some of the prominent and predominant among them include the following:

1. Lack of proper ICT infrastructure Digital libraries demand cutting edge ITC infrastructure such as:

a) High end and powerful Servers;

Structured LAN with Broadband Intranet facilities, ideally optical fiber based Gigabit networks;

b) Required number of Workstations capable of providing online information services, computing and multimedia applications;

c) Internet connectivity with sufficient bandwidth, capable of meeting the informational and computational requirement of the user community;

d) There are many more related facilities / services which are highly essential in an ideal digital library environment. It is observed that the

ICT infrastructure in most of the Institutions / Organizations, barring exceptions, is not up to the desired level so as to run advanced digital library services to the optimum level.

2. Lack of proper planning and integration of information resources:

Presently the library acquisitions in India are either paper based and electronic. In most of the libraries, paper based documents outnumber the electronic subscriptions and acquisitions. Some of the libraries need retro-conversion and digitization of library holdings too.

Literature on related studies show that there is a severe lapse on the libraries with regard to proper planning of their information resources which are conducive for developing digital libraries.

Also, the electronic resources penetrate to the libraries in a multiplicity of complex formats and with different access terms and conditions. These information resources are scattered and distributed across a wide variety of publication types and a vast number of publishers. There is a dire need for proper planning and a meticulously framed content integration model which is achieved and implemented through world standard digital library technologies.

3. Rigidity in the publishers’ policies and data formats:

Having successfully installed and configured a digital library does not qualify a library to automatically populate all its digital collection into the digital library. One has to obtain publisher’s consent and copyright permissions for the same. Digital library software’s usually accept and process all popular and standard digital formats such as HTML, Word, RTF, PPT, or PDF. Most of the publishers put their materials in their own proprietary e-book reader formats, from which the text extraction becomes almost impossible. A vast majority of the scholarly content rests in journal literature and due to copyright issues they cannot be easily (almost impossible) find its way into the local repositories of the digital library.

4. Lack of ICT strategies and policies:

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4 A vast majority of the libraries in India do not have laid down policies on ICT panning and strategies to meet the challenges posed by the technology push, the information overload, as well as the demand pull from the users.

5. Lack of technical skills:

The human resources available in the libraries need time-to-time professional enrichment inputs and rigorous training on the latest technologies which are playing around in the new information environment. The kinds of training programmers being imparted in India at the moment are not able to meet the demand in terms of quantity as well as quality.

6. Management support:

For the provision of world class information systems, resources and services the libraries need the wholehearted support from the respective management. Institutional support in terms of proper funding, human resources and IT skills enrichment are prerequisites for the development and maintenance of state-of-art digital library systems and services.

7. Copyright / IPR issues:

Issues of copyright, intellectual property and fair use concerns are posing unprecedented array of problems to the libraries and librarians are struggling to cope with all these related issues in the new digital information environment.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In the digital era information has become the fourth basic need of our life and our

country cannot be too covering behind from the changing in information world.

Therefore library responsibility is to collect dissemination and preserve the printed heritage of our country, and the most important issue is the ever changing technology. The World Wide Web is still very young and advances continue to make development much easier. It is important to keep up with all of the standards that are being made for the web which are being created by agencies like the World Wide Web consortium. So we can say that in the digital library various type of authentic technology are used such as information technologies, communication technologies, online database, multimedia database, user nets, e-mail services, CD ROMs etc. So adoption of digitization in the libraries we much have skilled and specialized staff members who should have co-operation and co-ordination among themselves.

REFERENCES

1. Waters, D.J. (1998). What are digital libraries? CLIR Issues, July/August. URL:

http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues04.H TML

2. Steele, Colin. (1995). the digital library: do's, don'ts and developments. The Electronic Library, 13(5), 435-437.

3. Arms, W.Y. (2000), Digital Libraries, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

4. Schatz, B. R. (1997). Information retrieval in digital libraries: bringing search to the Internet. Science, 275(N5298), 327-334.

5. Waters, D. J. (1998). What are digital libraries? CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Issues, No. 4.

http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues04.h tml.

6. Government of India. New Computer Policy.

Department of Electronics. Electronics Information and Planning. 12 (2) pp 89-94.