Page 21 - DLIS105_REFERENCE_SOURCES_AND_SERVICES

Reference Sources and Services

Notes (vii) Internet in no way makes a library or its collection redundant; and
(viii) most documents in Internet are copyrighted. Hence, downloading any of them without
the permission of the concerned authority is illegal.
Many journals and newspapers are also available free of cost on Internet. For reading you do not
need a password, neither you are to pay any extra money other than normal Internet charge and
local telephone charge. A few examples of such journals and newspapers are given here with their
URLs. Reader’s Digest [Reader’s Digest-rd.com]; Hindustan Times [www.hindustantimes.com]; Nav
Bharat Times (Hindi newspaper) [navbharattimes.indiatimes.com]; and Ananda Bazar Patrika
(Bengali newspaper) [www.anandabazar.com]. Apart from English, you can search Internet also in
Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil using the search engine Google.
There are thousands of other journals, which you can access through Internet on payment basis.
One of the special features of the Internet edition of journals is that you get the latest issues of the
journal in many cases earlier than their printed counterparts. For example, the latest issue of many
American journals reaches India by sea mail about a month or more after its release in USA. Using
Internet you can see the issue on the same day it is released.
The Internet edition of newspapers is updated several times a day. Hence, the news available in the
Internet edition in many cases will be more up-to-date than their printed counterparts.
You have already come to know that for many documents available in Internet one has to pay. Let
us see, how this payment is made. Suppose you want to subscribe to a few Internet edition of
journals for your library. First of all, you are to contact the publishers of the journals. They will send
you the bills for payment. Once you have made the payment, you will be given the URLs, i.e., web
addresses, of the respective journals and their passwords. Now, whenever needed you can access
the full-text of any of the journals following the normal procedure of using Internet.
World Wide Web - The abbreviation of World Wide Web is WWW. It is also referred simply as the
web. The web does not have its own databases. However, it searches the databases owned by others
and finds out the required information [Meadow: p3].
The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist of Centre Europeene Recherche
Nuclear (CERN) by using a hypertext model and Standard Generalised Mark-up Language (SGML)
with some extensions. To launch the web, an international telecommunication network was needed
which Internet provided. Berners-Lee coded the documents in hypertext with Internet addresses
that could be read by a program called browser that copied the hypertext documents from servers
along with text and graphics.
The web is not only a medium for the exchange of scientific information, but also for advertising
products, disseminating news, making friendship with like-minded people at different parts of the
world, choosing life partners, and so on. It is an integral part of our culture today [Meadow: p33].
Millions of computers all over the world are holding databases created using various software.
These databases are of various sizes and qualities and devoted to almost any subject we can think
of. To harvest information from these databases a mechanism was needed. The Internet and the
web combining together provided the most-wanted mechanism.

Virtual Reality Products

The image that we see in a looking glass is a virtual image. In a virtual reality environment the
observer gets a feeling as if he/she is a part of the system. Many of us are familiar with video games
like car racing. The person who wants to play this video game sits in a chair in front of a computer
screen and comes to know which car visible on the screen he/she is to drive. There are all the
mechanisms needed for car driving whereby you can increase or decrease the speed of your car,
change lane, take left or right turn, apply break and so on. The moment the race starts, you also start

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