Resource Sharing in Digital Environment through Internet: Problems and Prospects

Abstract

The libraries exist in many forms and are of many types. With the advancement of information technology, we have image libraries, audio libraries and even digital libraries. A digital library may simply be defined as the library, which has all the documents in the digital form rather than the print media. In traditional libraries, we have the documents in printed forms while in case of digital libraries; all the documents are found in digitized forms. A library can serve at least three roles in learning, viz.; first, practical role in sharing expensive sources like physical and human resources, secondly, cultural role in preserving and organizing artifacts and ideas and thirdly social and intellectual roles by bringing together people and ideas. The libraries serve as centers of interdisciplinary places shared by learners from all disciplines. Digital libraries extend such interdisciplinary approach by making diverse information resources available beyond the physical space shared by a group of learners. Digital libraries have been in use for the last three decades, but there is a constant change and improvement in the technology used by digital libraries in the last decade. By the 1990’s, the technology made it possible for digital libraries to include different items like text, image, audio and video. Nowadays, visual information systems are gaining more popularity as compared to text based information systems. Therefore, digital libraries are becoming more graphical in nature and they provide access to digital information collections. The digitalization is the process of conversion of any fixed or analog media – books, journal articles, photos, paintings, microforms into electronic form though scanning, sampling or even reeking. It is the creation of digital collection of information with multimedia features, that offer faster and easy access to a large number of users. In digitization, the documents are either scanned from print image or directly reproduced in digital form on Floppy, CDs, DVDs and other digital media. The digitalization process provides solutions to traditional library problems such as conservation, preservation, storage, multimedia documents, remote access to information collection and acquisition or original digital works created by publishers, agencies and scholars, access to external material not held in-house by providing pointers to website, other library collection and publishers servers. Though, there are various means of resource sharing like, telephone, fax, xeroxing and e-mail etc. (Dhiman, 1998) but the Internet is one of the media over which many library resources are put in the form of web sites in digitized form. The users can access the information from such sites in digitized form. This paper discusses some important issues regarding Internet uses in library and its role in resource sharing in digital environment.