When i was browsing the internet, i encountered many information environment. But digital libraries caught my attention. So i decided to choose this information environment.
History of digital libraries
The idea of easy, finger-tip access to information-what we conceptualize as digital libraries today-began with Vannenar Bush's Memex machine (Bush, 1945) and has continued to evolve with each advance in information technology. With the arrival of computers, the concept centered on large bibliographic databases, the now familiar online retrieval and public access systems that are part of any contemporary library. When computers were connected into large networks
forming the Internet, the concept evolved again, and research turned to creating libraries of digital information that could be accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world. Phrases like "virtual library," "electronic library," "library without walls" and, most recently, "digital library," all have been used interchangeably to describe this broad concept.
What is a digital library?
There is much confusion surrounding this phrase, stemming from three factors. First, the library community has used several different phrases over the years to denote this concept-electronic library, virtual library, library without walls-and it
never was quite clear what each of these different phrases meant. "Digital library" is simply the most current and most widely accepted term and is now used almost exclusively at conferences, online, and in the literature.
One thing digital libraries will not be is a single, completely digital system that provides instant access to all information, for all sectors of society, from anywhere in the world. This is simply unrealistic. This concept comes from the early days
when people were unaware of the complexities of building digital libraries. Instead, they will most likely be a collection of disparate resources and disparate systems, catering to specific communities and user groups, created for specific purposes. They also will include, perhaps indefinitely, paper-based collections. Further, interoperability across digital libraries-of technical architectures, metadata, and document formats-will also only likely be possible within relatively bounded systems developed for those specific purposes and communities.
For librarians, this definition of a digital library, and these characteristics, are the most logical because it expands and extends the traditional library, preserves the valuable work that they do, while integrating new technologies, new processes, and new media.
To start with, let us first know some related information that will help me identify my role in the environment.
There is now a critical mass of digital information resources that can be used to support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators in their work and study. The production of information is on the increase and ways to deal with this
effectively are required. There is the need to ensure that quality information isn’t lost amongst the masses of digital data created everyday. If we can continue to improve the management, interrogation and serving of ‘quality’ information there is huge potential to enhance knowledge creation across learning and research
communities.
Nowadays, it is so important to maximize your time since you have many work to do and you have limited time per day. It is also important to be at ease while doing your tasks. Since technology is growing fast, digital library was created to
help those people who have busy schedules like us, students or teachers and other employees.
The aim of the Information Environment is to help provide convenient access to resources for research and learning through the use of resource discovery and resource management tools and the development of better services and practice. The Information Environment aims to allow discovery, access and use of resources for research and learning irrespective of their location.
My role in this kind of environment is to dessiminate reliable and sufficient information since many rely on digital libraries for their research. And if the information given was wrong, insufficient or hoax, that would give our subcribers
another problem. Since our goal is to provide fast and easy access to information, we should not give the people another problem.
The digital library community seems to face a dilemma at this point. Through its pursuit of design goals of flexibility, extensibility, modularity and abstraction, and its promulgation of those goals as common practice through its implementation of XML metadata standards, it has managed to substantially impede progress towards another commonly held goal, interoperability of digital library content across a range of systems.
Challenges
Creating “effective” digital libraries poses serious challenges for existing and future technologies. The integration of digital media into traditional collections will not be straightforward, like previous new media (e.g., video audio tapes), because of the unique nature of digital information it is less fixed, easily copied, and remotely accessible by multiple users simultaneously. Traditional library processes such as collection development and reference, though forming a potential basis for "digital library" work, will have to be revised and enhanced to accommodate these differences. Taking what we know about libraries as a starting point, we can begin to examine in more detail what the specific challenges might be.
Metadata
Metadata is another issue central to the development of digital libraries. Metadata is the data the describes the content and attributes of any particular item in a digital library. It is a concept familiar to librarians because it is one of the primary
things that librarians do--they create cataloguing records that describe documents. Metadata is important in digital libraries because it is the key to resource discovery and use of any document. Anyone who has used Alta Vista, Excite, or any of the other search engines on the Internet knows that simple full-text searches don't scale in a large network. One can get thousands of hits, but most of them will be irrelevant. While there are formal library standards for metadata, namely AACR, such records are very time-consuming to create and require specially trained personnel. Human cataloguing, though superior, is just too labour extensive for the already large and rapidly expanding information environment. Thus, simpler schemes for metadata are being proposed as solutions.
While they are still in their infancy, a number of schemes have emerged, the most prominent of which is the Dublin Core, an effort to try and determine the "core" elements needed to describe materials. The first workshop took place at OCLC
headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, hence the name "Dublin Core." The Dublin Core workshops defined a set of fifteen metadata elements--much simpler than those used in traditional library cataloguing. They were designed to be simple enough to
be used authors, but at the same time, descriptive enough to be useful in resource discovery.
The lack of common metadata standards-ideally, defined for use in some specified context-is yet another a barrier to information access and use in a digital library, or in a coordinated digital library scheme.
Naming, identifiers, and persistence
The fifth issue is related to metadata. It is the problem of naming in a digital library. Names are strings that uniquely identify digital objects and are part of any document's metadata. Names are as important in a digital library as an ISBN
number is in a traditional library.
Any system of naming that is developed must be permanent, lasting indefinitely. This means, among other things, that the name can't be bound up with a specific location. The unique name and its location must be separate. This is very much
unlike URLs, the current method for identifying objects on the Internet. URL's confound in one string several items that should be separate. They include the method by which a document is accessed (e.g., HTTP), a machine name and
document path (its location), and a document file name which may or may not be unique (e.g., how many index.html files do you have on your Web site?). URLs are very bad names because whenever a file is moved, the document is often lost
entirely.
Copyright / rights management
Copyright has been called the "single most vexing barrier to digital library development" (Chepesuik, 1997:49). The current paper-based concept of copyright breaks down in the digital environment because the control of copies is
lost. Digital objects are less fixed, easily copied, and remotely accessible by multiple users simultaneously. The problem for libraries is that, unlike private businesses or publishers that own their information, libraries are, for the most part,
simply caretakers of information--they don't own the copyright of the material they hold. It is unlikely that libraries will ever be able to freely digitize and provide access to the copyrighted materials in their collections. Instead, they will have to develop mechanisms for managing copyright, mechanisms that allow them to provide information without violating copyright, called rights management.
Preservation
Another important issue is preservation--keeping digital information available in perpetuity. In the preservation of digital materials, the real issue is technical obsolescence. Technical obsolescence in the digital age is like the deterioration of
paper in the paper age. Libraries in the pre-digital era had to worry about climate control and the de-acidification of books, but the preservation of digital information will mean constantly coming up with new technical solutions.
The purpose of preservation is to ensure protection of information of enduring value for access by present and future generations (Conway, 1990: 206). Libraries and archives have served as the central institutional focus for preservation, and both types of institutions include preservation as one of their core functions. In recent decades, many major libraries and archives have established formal preservation programs for traditional materials which include regular allocation of resources for preservation, preventive measures to arrest deterioration of materials, remedial measures to restore the usability of selected materials, and the incorporation of preservation needs and requirements into overall program planning.
Preservationists within the library and archival community have been instrumental in developing an array of tools and methodologies to reduce the decay of traditional materials and to restore books and documents that have deteriorated to such an extent that their longevity and usability are threatened. Provisions for fire protection and adequate environmental controls frequently are incorporated into new library and archival facilities. Rehousing of acid-based paper materials is a common task in many repositories and microfilming is used extensively and cost effectively to preserve endangered materials. Undertakings such as the brittle books initiative, the American Newspapers Project, and the NEH-funded microfilming program have saved millions of unique and imperiled items (Preserving the Intellectual Heritage). Many libraries and archives have curbed their voracious appetites for acquisition and collecting in an effort to balance the breadth and depth of their holdings against long-term stewardship responsibilities. The change over from acid to alkaline paper in publishing and much desktop printing counts as a significant victory for preservation.
Libraries around the world have been working on this daunting set of challenges for several years now. They have created many digital library initiatives and projects, and have formed various national schemes for jointly exploring key issues. With several years accumulated experience, the initial enthusiasm surrounding the development of the digital library has been replaced by sober second thought. Librarians have discovered that, with a few exceptions, making a business case for digitization and investments in digital technology is more difficult than first envisioned, especially given the technical and legal constraints that must first be overcome. As with most other technical developments in libraries over the years,
we will have to move forward in small, manageable, evolutionary steps, rather than in an rapid revolutionary manner.
As information professionals, we live in very interesting times. Effective search and discovery over open and hidden digital resources on the Internet remains a problematic and challenging task. The difficulties are exacerbated by today's
greatly distributed scholarly information landscape. This distributed information environment is populated by silos of: full-text repositories maintained by commercial and professional society publishers; preprint servers and Open Archive
Initiative (OAI) provider sites; specialized Abstracting and Indexing (A & I) services; publisher and vendor vertical portals; local, regional, and national online catalogs; Web search and metasearch engines; local e-resource registries and
digital content databases; campus institutional repository systems; and learning
management systems.
All the information i have gathered were based on my research. If i am part of the digital library institute i would like to address those problem and give better solutions to it. Since I too, rely on digital libraries on my research.
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-=♥yhang♥=-
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