Building A Digital Library

Abstract

The idea of converting library materials into digital format for creating digital collections has advanced rapidly in the last few years, thus leading to the concept of a digital library. A digital library is a library that contains materials in digitized form or access to internal or external digital resources. Digital information resources include not only rapidly growing collection of electronic full text resources, but also images, video, sound, and even objects of virtual reality. The most important component of a digital library is digital collection it holds or has access to. A digital library can have a wide range of resources. A digital library is not a single entity although it may have digital contents created in-hourse or acquired in digital formats stored locally on servers. A digital library may also act a portal site providing access to digital collections held elsewhere. The digital imaging technology offers a number of choices that can be adopted to translate from print to digital. Digital conversion process includes Document, Data Capture, Data Processing, Storage, Indexing and retrieval. Dublin Core standard is adopted internationally to create Meta data of digital resources. The advent of the Internet acted as catalyst for Digital Library initiatives. Digital library environment is the context of rapidly charging computer and communication technology. This paper explains digitization methods, process of digitization and tools required for digitization.