Step forward

National Library leads the library sector into digital era:

Udaya Cabral

National Library and Documentation Services Board in collaboration with German Cultural Centre (Goethe - Institut) organizes a two days workshop on library digitization this month.

The main aim of this workshop is to develop library digitization concept in the library sector in the country. National Library has organized three workshops on library conservation hosted by the Goethe-Institut, the cultural institute of the Republic of Germany with a global reach, during the last three years.

The first workshop was on challengers in library conservation in tropical environment; the second was on conservation of photograph materials and third was organized by film cooperation on preservation of films in tropical climate.

This year, workshop organizers focused their attention to modern trends of library digitization. There is a dialog among library professionals in the country on issues and challengers in converting the conventional library to digital library regarding the Sri Lankan context rather than Europe. Expertises of the world have been invited for these workshop series.

Thomas Stacker ,Deputy Director of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel will serve as the key recourse person of the workshop this time.

The idea of digital library, electronic library, virtual library, library without walls began with Vannenar Bush's memex machine and developed with information technology. Concept of digital library simultaneously developed with information technology.

When computer arrived in the world a large bibliographic data bases were created by the libraries for readers' convenience. Now it has been developed as online retrieval systems which functions almost all university libraries in the country.

With the concept of internet arrived, all computers were connected to network for forming large network.

The concept of the digital library is strengthened by the internet technology and it would help to retrieve digital information that could be accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world.

Libraries and other cultural institutions especially in Europe have increased the digitizing of manuscript and printed material, both ancient and modern, but easily damaged or, like newspapers, perishable. Digital reproduction is designed to serve the growing community of libraries, by providing greater access to their resources as well as helping to preserve the original materials and contents so make easy access and preservation are prominent goals of library digitization.

With the development of IT technology in the country, concept of digital library also grows up. Some special libraries university libraries have already started to create digital libraries in their formal libraries. Accordingly National library is planning a long term project to digitize its huge depository for creating a digital library.

There are several issues confronting us in creating a digital library. This workshop will help to discuss our issues with the European expert and be able to get his ideas and experiences according to the European point of view.

Building digital collection

Digitization or converting paper and other media in existing collections to digital form is a main purpose of creating a digital library.

Library must have a technical staff to support digitization of the exiting collection and the technical instruments such as scanners, computers which are essential for this purpose. As an answer for this issue, user friendly easy handling instruments are available in the world. Even non skill persons are able to digitize the collection with less knowledge on information technology.

Difficulties of acquisition

Journals, books, magazines and etc are designed in digital format before they are printed. Libraries have to acquire the printed format and create digital version in the library for creating a digital library. It is labour and money consuming task if the library can acquire digital versions directly from the publishers this issue can be minimized.

The current concept of copyright breaks down in the digital environment as one digital copy can be retrieved many readers in different locations by paying or not. In advance it violates the copyright law in several ways. Digital copies can be robbed and copied easily and can be accessed by multiple users simultaneously.

We will have to develop mechanisms for managing copyright mechanism that would be allowed to provide information without violating copyright laws.

Coordination of digital collection building

Acquire digital materials and doing in house digitization is expensive, especially under take along. If the libraries and the institutions with similar goals can work together, the overall cost involved in these activities can be reduced.

Metadata issues

Meta data is another issue in the creation of digital library. Metadata describes the content and attributes of any particular item in a digital library.

There are formal library standards for metadata. For instance, AACR system is very time consuming to create and require special trained personals. Thus simple schemes of metadata are being proposed as a solution ex ; Dublin core

Preservation

Library materials in the digital library may be floppy disks, compact disks, DVD and etc. Materials stored in older media could be loss because there will no longer have hard ware or software to read them.

Thus libraries will have to keep moving digital information from storage medium to another storage medium with the development of data storage formats. Libraries have to migrate the data that is translating the data from older format to newer format while transferring the storage medium as a solution.

At the end of the workshop library professionals would be able to gain much comprehensive knowledge that would be beneficiary to improve their own digital libraries. We wish this workshop would be a stage for library professionals to express their ideas to create a good platform to step forward to digital era.