Digital Libraries are the electronic counterparts of traditional paper libraries, where the digital medium opens new opportunities, especially in the area of improved access support, increased content availability, powerful content interlinking, and reduced costs, but also imposes new challenges like long-term preservation in the context of fast changing storage technologies. Further important challenges are issues of copyright and digital rights management and the cost of digitization for not digitally-born content.
Various definitions for Digital Libraries exist. These can be summarized as a Digital Library is an information system targeted towards a specific community, where content from different sources is collected and managed, content is structured and enriched with metadata, and a set of services is offered that makes the content available to a user community via a communication network, typically the Internet.
Digital libraries have attracted almost all the developed and developing countries due to its multifaceted features and the opportunities it extend to the information providers and information seekers. It offers new levels of access to broader audiences of users and new opportunities for library and information science field to advance both theory and practice. Creating effective digital libraries and providing cutting edge digital information services poses serious challenges for existing and future technologies. It include collection building, infrastructure, acceptability, access restrictions, readability, standardization, authentication, preservation, copyright, policy and strategic issues, user interface and others.
Digital libraries have attracted almost all the developed and developing countries due to its multifaceted features and the opportunities it extend to the information providers and information seekers. It offers new levels of access to broader audiences of users and new opportunities for library and information science field to advance both theory and practice. Creating effective digital libraries and providing cutting edge digital information services poses serious challenges for existing and future technologies. It includes collection building, infrastructure, acceptability, access restrictions, readability, standardization, authentication, preservation, copyright, policy and strategic issues, user interface and others.
The development and sharing of digital library collections using the freely available software like greenstone or DSpace will also make the Digital Library as a platform to provide the digital collections. Like a Greenstone, it is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections, provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO, it integrates functions such as metadata, full text search and retrieval, multilingual support, support for multiple document formats and administration.
The other activities that managed by Digital Library is Search services that required for efficiently and effectively finding relevant content in the content collection. There are two approaches for supporting search in Digital Libraries, which may also be combined with each other, On the one hand, methods of information and multimedia retrieval and on the other hand metadata-based search.
Information and multimedia retrieval is a search approach which is based on a direct analysis of the content objects of a Digital Library. For efficient information retrieval, retrieval indices are automatically built and updated. A second method of information access is the use of metadata for retrieving relevant content objects. Metadata is data about data, or more precisely in the Digital Library context. Metadata form an additional information layer on top of the content objects, which are managed by a Digital Library, and can be used in retrieving interesting information, in selecting relevant content objects from a search result list.
Information and multimedia retrieval is a search approach which is based on a direct analysis of the content objects of a Digital Library. For efficient information retrieval, retrieval indices are automatically built and updated. A second method of information access is the use of metadata for retrieving relevant content objects. Metadata is data about data, or more precisely in the Digital Library context. Metadata form an additional information layer on top of the content objects, which are managed by a Digital Library, and can be used in retrieving interesting information, in selecting relevant content objects from a search result list.
Digital libraries also enable the creation of local content, strengthen the mechanisms and capacity of the library’s information systems and services. It increase the portability, efficiency of access, flexibility, availability and preservation of content. Digital Libraries also can help move the nation towards realizing the enormously powerful vision of ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to the best and the latest of human thought and culture. Digital library brings the library to the user, overcoming all barriers.
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