What is a digital library?

Difinition of digital library

A library in which a significant proportion of the resources are available in machine-readable format (as opposed to print or microform), accessible by means of computers. The digital content may be locally held or accessed remotely via computer networks. In libraries, the process of digitization began with the catalog, moved to periodical indexes and abstracting services, then to periodicals and large reference works, and finally to book publishing. Some of the largest and most successful digital libraries are Project Gutenberg, ibiblio, and the Internet Archive.

Advantages

While traditional libraries are limited by storage space, digital libraries have the potential to store much more information simply because digital information requires very little physical space to contain it. As such, the cost of maintaining a digital library is much lower than that of a traditional library. A traditional library must spend large sums of money paying for staff, book maintenance, rent, and additional books. Digital libraries do away with these fees.

Digital libraries can immediately adopt innovations in technology providing users with improvements in electronic and audio book technology as well as presenting new forms of communication such as wikis and blogs.

• No physical boundary. The user of a digital library need not go to the library physically.
• Round-the-clock availability. A major advantage of digital libraries is that people from all over the world can gain access to the information at any time, as long as an Internet connection is available.
• Multiple accesses. The same resources can be used at the same time by a number of users.
• Structured approach. A digital library provides access to much richer content in a more structured manner, that is, we can easily move from the catalog to the particular book, then to a particular chapter, and so on.
• Information retrieval. There is flexibility in the use of search terms, that is, key words. A digital library can provide very user-friendly interfaces, giving clickable access to its resources.
• Preservation and conservation. An exact copy of the original can be made any number of times without any degradation in quality.
• Space. When the library has no space for extension, digitization is the only solution.
• Networking. A particular digital library can provide the link to any other resources of other digital libraries very easily; thus a seamlessly integrated resource sharing can be achieved.
• Cost. In theory, the cost of maintaining a digital library is lower than that of a traditional library. A traditional library must spend large sums of money paying for staff, book maintenance, rent, and additional books. Although digital libraries do away with these fees, it has since been found that digital libraries can be no less expensive in their own way to operate. Digital libraries can and do incur large costs for the conversion of print materials into digital format, for the technical skills of staff, and for the costs of maintaining online access (i.e., servers, bandwidth costs, etc.). Also, the information in a digital library must often be migrated every few years to the latest digital media. This process can incur very large costs in hardware and skilled personnel.

Disadvantages

Some people have criticized that digital libraries are hampered by copyright law because works cannot be shared over different periods of time in the manner of a traditional library. The content is, in many cases, public domain or self-generated only. Some digital libraries, such as Project Gutenberg, work to digitize  out-of-copyright works and make them freely available to the public.

Digital libraries cannot reproduce the environment of a traditional library.

Many people also find reading printed material to be easier than reading material on a computer screen, although this depends heavily on presentation as well as personal preferences. Also, due to technological develop-

ments, a digital library can see some of its content become out-of-date and its data may become inaccessible.

Academic repositories

Many academic libraries are actively involved in building repositories of their institution’s books, papers, theses, and other works which can be digitized. Many of these repositories are made available to the academic community or the general public. Institutional repositories are often referred to as digital libraries.

The future

Large-scale digitization projects are under way at Google, the Million Book Project, European Digital Library, World Digital Library, Yahoo! and MSN… With continued improvements in book handling and presentation technologies such as optical character recognition and e-books, and many alternative depositories and business models, digital libraries are rapidly growing in popularity, as demonstrated by the efforts of Google, Yahoo! and MSN. And, just as libraries have ventured into audio and video collections, so have digital libraries such as the Internet Archive.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_library