DIGITAL LIBRARY : CONCEPT AND CHALLENGES

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1 e-library Science Research Journal ISSN : Research Papers Impact Factor : NEERA BANSAL Librarian, Fateh Chand College for Women, Hisar Abstract The proliferation of information and rapid development of innovative information technology and web based information services has transformed the basic structures of libraries. Digital technologies have reinvented traditional libraries. Digital library is the collection of services and electronic information resources. In digital libraries, services are fully automated and all resources are in digital form. These libraries are a combination of digital computing, storage and communication mechanism. The present paper discusses about digital library, the reasons behind the emergence of digital libraries, the step by step process of digitization, specific electronic resources and services and number of challenges are also highlighted. KEYWORDS : Digital Library, information technology, communication mechanism. INTRODUCTION: Libraries are undergoing a paradigm shift on one side by the complexities of information in an array of different types and formats and on the other side the ever increasing use demand. Application of information and communication technologies in information management has made a drastic change in library services. The advent of electronic publication has led to the emergence of electronic resources. Libraries today buy, subscribe to, license and accumulated information in an unprecedented array of content categories or publication types and in a rapidly proliferating mix of formats such as digital and print (Sreejaya, 2008). The roles and functions of libraries and archives over the long run of history have always involved the transmission of the ideas and expression emanating from prior generations to future ones. Mass digitization captures the pages, potentially with great accuracy, and permits us to save page views independent of the fragile paper carrier of the information.. Mass digitization has become an essential step, then, in preserving knowledge current and available today in one or another physical medium, into knowledge and information available today, tomorrow, next year, next century, and perhaps next millennium for use, re-use, mixing, and re-mixing. A step beyond mass digitization and a step necessary for information and knowledge born and distributed digitally is the incorporation of those digital objects in a digital library for use by humans. The practice of digital librarianship, cybrarianship, in many 1

2 different ways and in many different places is exciting now and will be even more so in the future (Keller, 2009). S.R. Ranganathan, The Father of Library Science, had given five fundamental laws to be followed by each library. Today digital technologies are in forefront and offer a helping hand to libraries for true accomplishment of these laws. Digital libraries provide accessibility of digital resources to every user either sitting near or residing far away from the library. Digital library supports that books are for use. Now every reader is capable of accessing the required information and every information source, it may be book, journal, database, thesis, dissertation, news, article, patent and many more, is in the reach of the users. Digital services of libraries are proved to be time saving. The tremendous flow of data and information indicates that libraries are really a growing organism. Digital Library Libraries are considered as a storehouse of knowledge. The way of capturing, storing, preserving and disseminating knowledge has been changed nowadays and the libraries are becoming digital where all information resources are converted in digitized form and digital information services are provided to the user community. The term Digital Library in a broad sense is a computerized system that allows obtaining a coherent means of access to an organized, electronically stored repository of information and data. The information resources available in the form of digital or electronic format are known as digital resources(mathurajothi, 2009.) (Sekar, Venkatesh & Radha,2009) states that Digital Libraries could be referred to as computerized network system where all the information is stored in electronic format, which can be accessed and transmitted through networks enabling retrieval of desired information by a large number of users. Digital library is an organization containing electronic documents, computers, networks, internet connection, scanner and digital camera, collection of information that is stored and accessed electronically. The user is able to consult materials that are stored on computers around the world Digital libraries are heterogeneous, multimedia and data retrievable and are aided by hypermedia and hypertext programs and experimental expert systems. (Mariraj & Ramesh, 2009) suggest that Digital Library is a managed collection of information with associated services, where the information is stored in digital formats and accessible over a network. Why Digital Library The unprecedented surge of activities and interests in digital library can generally be attributed to the following factors : Emergence of internet and web technologies as a media of information delivery and access. The internet, particularly world wide web allows rapid access to a wide variety of networked information resources, extending a uniform interface to a vast number of multimedia resources. The web being a hypermedia based system, allows linking amongst electronic resources; Availability of highly evolved, extraordinarily simple and intuitive user interface, i.e. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator for all prevalent platforms; and Advances in online storage technologies enabling storage of large amounts of contents at increasingly affordable cost; The digital library offers significant and unparallel improvement and value addition to library services while providing workable solutions to problems traditionally associated with the management of printbased collections in traditional libraries. Improved information retrieval and enhanced document delivery capabilities are widely acclaimed strength of digital libraries (Arora, 2004). Digital Library Architecture The digital library infrastructure will also support the basic functions of libraries: selection and 2

3 acquisition; provision of intellectual access for discovery (cataloging and indexing); circulation and distribution; interpretation and instruction (reference and research consultation services as well as basic information literacy and information heuristic instruction); preservation; analysis, manipulation, presentation, and display (services supporting the use of digital objects in academic, commercial, and practical settings) (Keller, 2009). Different Stages in Digitizing Documents Cornell University Library/Research Departments (2000), provides six stages in digitizing documents for a digital library: Registering, Scanning, Optical Character Recognition, Proofreading and formatting and producing the Final Version. i. Registering Before scanning large number of documents, there is the need to first register them and use a filing system to keep their track. If not, you risk misplacing hardcopies, losing files, skipping steps in the process or duplicating work, perhaps without realizing it. There is also the risk of losing electronic versions of files because they have been misnamed or saved in the wrong subdirectory. Moreover, a good filing system is vital, so everyone in the digitizing team knows what he is supposed to do, and he can fill in for another person in case of absence. ii. Scanning documents It is necessary to clean and dust off the documents to be scanned; make sure that all the pages are present and in the right order. If the document is in poor condition, try to find a fresh copy. If it is a sheet fed scanner, cut the document open to get individual sheets to feed through the scanner. If necessary, you can rebind the documents later. If you do not want to damage the documents, you can photocopy each page and feed in the photocopy through the scanner, though this uses a lot of paper and reduces the quality of the scan. To scan a document on a flatbed scanner, place it face down on the scanner platen or put the pages into the sheet feeder. Then, in the software, choose a setting, resolution and colour and scan each page of the document at the settings you have chosen. iii. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software converts a scanned image into a text file that a word processor can read. To do this, it must first recognize where the text is on the page. The software breaks the text blocks down into lines or into an individual character. It tries to match the image of each letter against patterns it recognizes as an a, b, etc. There is a problem to encounter with languages that use Latin scripts with accented characters. As a solution, you should use the OCR software that is specific for language. iv. Proofreading. This is the act of making corrections to the document text and layout. This is done in two ways: a.comparing the scanned text on the screen with the hardcopy and entering the corrections directly into the computer. The word processor's spellchecker will help in spelling errors quickly. b.printing out the scanned text and comparing it with the original copy. Mark any corrections on the printout, and then enter them into the computer. This is a slower method, but may be the best option if there are no enough computers for each proofreader. 3

4 v. Reformatting The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software may produce a document that consists of straight text, no columns, no headers and footers. There is the need to reinsert these by hand or correct where they appear on the page. There may be also need to change the typeface, heading styles and so on, to make the document more attractive and readable. Alternatively, you may be able to adjust the settings of your OCR program to preserve the layout of the page. vi. Final Version For many documents, there is a need to add some information to the text so that readers can identify it easily. As for a book you must make sure that the book title, the author or the editor, the publisher and the publication date are all included. As for chapter in a book, you should include the title and the author of that chapter and the original page numbers in the printed version of the book. As for the journal articles you should include the journal title, the date, the volume and the issue number, the article title and the authors and the page numbers in the original printed journal. In other words there is the need to add Metadata to describe each document. E-RESOURCES IN DIGITAL LIBRARY Among the digital genres of content are e-journals (and their essential parts, e-articles), e-books (both born and circulated digitally as well as digitized ones), newspapers, government documents, Media objects (films, still images, sound recordings, diagrams, plans and the like), Java models, spreadsheets, and so forth. E-Journals : (Wikipedia, 2013) Electronic journals, also known as ejournals, e-journals, and electronic serials, are scholarly journals or intellectual magazines that can be accessed via electronic transmission. In practice, this means that they are usually published on the Web. They are a specialized form of electronic document: they have the purpose of providing material for academic research and study, and they are formatted approximately like journal articles in traditional printed journals. Being in electronic form, articles sometimes contain metadata that can be entered into specialized databases, such as DOAJ or OACL, as well as the databases and search-engines for the academic discipline concerned. Some electronic journals are online-only journals; some are online versions of printed journals, and some consist of the online equivalent of a printed journal, but with additional online-only (sometimes video and interactive media) material. E-Books : E-books are comprised of any book or monograph of text made available in electronic form. E- books are appearing under the e-resources. Some books are published in print form as well as in e-book format, whie some are beginning to be available only in electronic format. Some e-books include multimedia capabilities so they are called multimedia e-books, which include text, graphics, audio, video and animation effects. E-books can be stored in hard disk server, CD-ROM or in DVD-ROM (Panda & Mohanta,2008). (Senthilkumar,Balaji,Manju, 2008) suggested three of the most useful properties of electronic books are: The ease with which such books can be simultaneously shared between multiple users. The ability to search through an individual book or a complete collection of books in order to locate particular items of sought after information The possibility of embedding hyperlinks at particular points in a book which can be used to link to 4

5 related items of information. In other parts of that book, in other books or in other digital libraries that might be located anywhere in the world. E-books could be divided into various categories: Downloadable e-books Print on Demand e-books Web accessible e-books E-Databases : A database is a collection of related items of information held in a form intelligible to the computer, these items may be references to journal papers, they may be the latest balance sheets for companies, they may be the full text of journal papers. The e-databases may be of two types : a) Bibliographic Databases : According to P.S.Kawatra, bibliographic database contains a file of document description that are records, one can use for deciding whether to search for the document itself. Document may be journal articles, reports, patents, books etc. Example are COMPENDEX, MEDLARS, INSPEC. b)non-bibliographic Databases : It is also referred as Data abnks or Fact Banks. Databank is used by a number of Indian institutes for their information storage, processing and retrieval purposes. It is of two types : (i) Textual Databases (ii) Numerical /statistical databases. Example are : Encyclopaedia of Associations' DATAbase by Gale Research Company. c)catalogue Card Database : Machine Readable Catalogue Database is for house keeping work of information retrieval. For example MARC (Panda & Mohanta,2008) Services of Digital Library : A modern digital library would provide the following services to its users regardless of their geographical location. Circulation of books, photocopying of article etc. Inter library loans Database searches Online /offline reservation User services such as membership, query. Reference support for subject searches. A liaisons librarian User education and training programs. Current awareness services Assistance in using computer facilities Access to library catalogues, databases, internet Publisher awareness service List of new publications received Electronic reference desk Assistance with bibliographic packages Flexible methods of submitting requests, e.g. via telephone, facsimile, , www, post Electronic delivery to requesters workstation, where possible (Verma, 2008). DIGITAL LIBRARY CHALLENGES The staff of the National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress have identified ten 5

6 challenges that must be met if large and effective digital libraries are to be created during the 21st century. The Library hopes that creative and innovative minds can devise solutions to these challenges. 1.Develop improved technology for digitizing analog materials : In order to build a comprehensive resource, historical materials now in analog form (e.g., books, journals, laboratory records, sound recordings, manuscripts, photographs) must be converted. Today, the technology for digital conversion is, at best, emergent and often forces a library to choose between risking damage to precious originals or producing the highest quality reproductions. 2.Design search and retrieval tools that compensate for abbreviated or incomplete cataloging or descriptive information : Providing access to library collections is labor-intensive. In order to apply scarce resources to the digitization of significant quantities of content, it is often necessary to reduce the level of detail offered in accompanying catalogs or indexes. Can automated tools permit the incorporation of factual knowledge into descriptive information, indexing, or search and retrieval systems? 3.Design tools that facilitate the enhancement of cataloging or descriptive information by incorporating the contributions of users : Can the digital library take advantage of distributed expertise? Among millions of users, there will be those who can enhance the description or cataloging of an item, thus improving the next researcher's chance of finding it. Collaborative tools could allow far-flung professional colleagues, e.g., faculty or graduate students to provide excellent enhancements to materials they employ for their own advanced research. Less expert users can also add value to the resource. What filters, methods for attributing enhancements without violating privacy, or other protections against misuse could support this enhancement of the resource? 4.Establish protocols and standards to facilitate the assembly of distributed digital libraries : How can a distributed resource like the National Digital Library be assembled to create a virtual unity? What types of protocols and what degree of standardization on types of digital objects will achieve a balance between feasibility of widespread implementation and coherence of access? How can distributed digital libraries best safeguard the rights associated with content while still providing the broadest possible access? 5. Address legal concerns associated with access, copying, and dissemination of physical and digital materials : A key element for digital libraries is appropriate recognition and protection of legal rights such as copyright, publicity, privacy, matters of obscenity, defamation intellectual property protection as well as less legalistic but serious concerns associated with the ethics of sharing or providing access to folk or ethnographic materials. The vision for digital libraries includes fluid, easy access to a wide variety of materials. This is often in conflict with the duties of libraries and archives entrusted with care and management of materials that may be subject to privacy rights or other needs for security. 6.Integrate access to both digital and physical materials : A user looking for an item in a library catalog should be able to identify it without regard to whether it is available in its original physical form or as a digital or microfilm reproduction. Intellectual descriptions of originals and reproductions should be presented in a fully integrated way. During the current experimental period, however, many digitization efforts are disconnected from traditional library services. Even when appropriate catalog records exist, digital content may fail to connect to potential users because individual items in digital collections can not be retrieved directly or are not identified appropriately to support links from traditional catalogs or bibliographic indexes. 7.Develop approaches that can present heterogenous resources in a coherent way : A digital library that provides diverse content will be characterized by heterogeneity in original format, in digital format and resolution, and in the level of detail and format of descriptive information that is available to support access. The Library of Congress is building a generic repository that can store objects in any format, and represent relationships between objects, such as a sequence of page-images forming a book, which might also have been transcribed and marked up in SGML. 8.Make the National Digital Library useful to different communities of users and for different purposes : How many different ways can users explore and discover content? What capabilities will permit users to customize the interface and specify preferences that affect retrieval results? How can differences in vocabulary be resolved? For example, how might an interface translate the search terms selected by today's users into the language of older historical documents? 6

7 9.Provide more efficient and more flexible tools for transforming digital content to suit the needs of endusers : Today, each content item in most digital libraries is represented in multiple forms or versions. The multiple forms exist to serve varieties of users. A content provider may produce large and small versions of images; compressed and uncompressed versions of images, texts, audio, and video; texts formatted for browser software and also formatted for preservation or publication; and materials both in proprietary formats and in public or "open" formats. What technologies can be developed to make digital objects malleable, migrate-able, and transformable? 10.Develop economic models for the support of the National Digital Library : The creation and maintenance of digital libraries is very expensive. Costs are incurred for production, for ongoing provision of access, and for preservation of the digital information. The cost to develop and operate a distributed architecture for long-term archiving, migration, and backup of digital materials will be high. Since the resource is distributed among providers, the net cost tends to be disguised. Libraries would benefit from better estimates of costs and trends in cost for production and maintenance of a corpus of digital information. CONCLUSION : Digitization presents opportunities for long term preservation of knowledge for future generation. Digital libraries are becoming a knowledge hub which works in distributed network environment. So libraries are finding newer ways and opportunities to grow and provide easy access to every bit of information. A wider range of digitized information services are proved to be far better for users. Today librarians will have to play a newer role to link with innovative trends for the benefit of users. REFERENCE 1. Arora, J. (2004). Digital Libraries : An Overview. In Information Technology Applications in Libraries : In Mahapatra, M. & Ramesh, D.B. (Eds).,A Textbook for Beginners (pp ).Bhubaneswar : Reproprint. 2. Keller, M.A. (2009, February). Establishing a Digital Library. Retrieved from 3. Mariraj, M. & Ramesh, R.(2009). Digital Libraries : An Overview. In Danrita, J., Ramesh, V.P. & Marichamy, T. (Eds.)., Future Concepts of Library & Information Services : Changes, Challenges and Role of Library Professionals (pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 4, Mathurajothi, S.(2009). Digital Libraries : An Overview. In Danrita, J., Ramesh, V.P. & Marichamy, T. (Eds.)., Future Concepts of Library & Information Services : Changes, Challenges and Role of Library Professionals (pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 5. Panda, K.C. & Mohanta, R. (2008). Role of E-Resources in Information Retrieval. In Lal, C.(Eds.)., Information Literacy in the Digital Age (pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 6 Sekar, K., Venkatesh, S. & Radha, R.(2009). Digital Library : An Overview. In Danrita, J., Ramesh, V.P. & Marichamy, T. (Eds.)., Future Concepts of Library & Information Services : Changes, Challenges and Role of Library Professionals (pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 7. Senthilkumar, R.,Balaji, N.G.&Manju, P.U.(2008).The Role of Digital Libraries in Future Librarianship. In Bavakutty, M.,Majeed, K.C.A.&Nasirudheen, T.P.O.(Eds.)., Future Librarianship in Knowledge Society(pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 8.Sreejaya, P.(2008). Upcoming Trends in Library Acquisitions and Special Reference to E-books. In Bavakutty, M.,Majeed, K.C.A.&Nasirudheen, T.P.O.(Eds.)., Future Librarianship in Knowledge Society (pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 9. Verma, N.C.(2008). Digital Library Information Resources and Services. In Bavakutty, M.,Majeed, K.C.A.&Nasirudheen, T.P.O.(Eds.)., Future Librarianship in Knowledge Society (pp ). New Delhi : Ess Ess. 10. Library of Congress. Challenges to Building an Effective Digital Library. Retrieved from 7