Creation and Development of a Virtual Library : Problems faced and Lessons learnt from the ‘Gyan Tawi’ Project

Abstract

This paper describes the growth of the Internet resources and mentions that the major challenge for the information professional is how to control the growing electronic information, how to evaluate this information to separate the worthwhile information from the trash and how to organize this information. With the development of the Internet, a new pattern of organization of information emerged where electronic documents are linked and arranged in the spatial order instead of traditional hierarchical order of arrangement of information. Moreover, the information is now directly accessible to users over a network of computers. Collecting the most relevant and significant free flowing Internet information and organizing it into a virtual library will facilitate most convenient information access to user communities. This paper highlights the problems faced and lessons learnt from the ‘Gyan Tawi’ virtual library project undertaken by the authors.