Resource Sharing in Digital Environment through Internet: Problems and Prospects
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Date
2002-02
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INFLIBNET Centre
Abstract
The libraries exist in many forms and are of many types. With the advancement of
information technology, we have image libraries, audio libraries and even digital
libraries. A digital library may simply be defined as the library, which has all the
documents in the digital form rather than the print media. In traditional libraries, we
have the documents in printed forms while in case of digital libraries; all the documents
are found in digitized forms. A library can serve at least three roles in learning, viz.; first,
practical role in sharing expensive sources like physical and human resources, secondly,
cultural role in preserving and organizing artifacts and ideas and thirdly social and
intellectual roles by bringing together people and ideas. The libraries serve as centers of
interdisciplinary places shared by learners from all disciplines. Digital libraries extend
such interdisciplinary approach by making diverse information resources available
beyond the physical space shared by a group of learners. Digital libraries have been in
use for the last three decades, but there is a constant change and improvement in the
technology used by digital libraries in the last decade. By the 1990’s, the technology
made it possible for digital libraries to include different items like text, image, audio and
video. Nowadays, visual information systems are gaining more popularity as compared
to text based information systems. Therefore, digital libraries are becoming more
graphical in nature and they provide access to digital information collections. The
digitalization is the process of conversion of any fixed or analog media – books, journal
articles, photos, paintings, microforms into electronic form though scanning, sampling or
even reeking. It is the creation of digital collection of information with multimedia
features, that offer faster and easy access to a large number of users. In digitization, the
documents are either scanned from print image or directly reproduced in digital form on
Floppy, CDs, DVDs and other digital media. The digitalization process provides
solutions to traditional library problems such as conservation, preservation, storage,
multimedia documents, remote access to information collection and acquisition or
original digital works created by publishers, agencies and scholars, access to external
material not held in-house by providing pointers to website, other library collection and
publishers servers. Though, there are various means of resource sharing like, telephone,
fax, xeroxing and e-mail etc. (Dhiman, 1998) but the Internet is one of the media over
which many library resources are put in the form of web sites in digitized form. The users
can access the information from such sites in digitized form. This paper discusses some
important issues regarding Internet uses in library and its role in resource sharing in
digital environment.
Description
Keywords
Digital Library, Resource Sharing, Internet