DIGITIZATION: AN OVERVIEW

Abstract

The age of digital technology has revolutionised communications. It is used and enjoyed by all strata of society for business, education, research, and entertainment. Digitisation of information is of particular relevance to business. Organizations must learn how to use information effectively, as competition will keep increasing and profit margins will be under pressure. Information should be stored in a manner that the retrieval is quick and storage safe and permanent. Paper records, books, journals and reports are not very handy as compared to CD-ROMs when it comes to looking for a particular piece of information. It may take, some times, weeks to compile the results, using traditional records. So, we are looking at digitisation as a solution for the coming years. The digital collections must include genre of library materials such as text (books, serials, dissertations/theses), numeric database (statistical/scientific) and special collections (image, audio, video, manuscript etc.). In this paper, the author focuses on the meaning of digitization, benefits of digitization, application area and digitisation process.