Page 109 - DLIS408_INFORMATION_TECHNOLOGY-APPLICATIONSL SCIENCES

Information Technology and Application

Notes library as a global virtual library—the libraries of thousands of “networked electronic libraries”.
The digital library need not be networked. A digital library is a library which has all the
information in electronic form and having electronic devices to have access to the digitized
information. Thus digital library is a library which has number of machine-readable publications
and facilities for remote access to several databases.
The American Digital Library Federation has defined the digital library as “Digital libraries are
organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer
intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence
overtime of collection of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for
use by a defined community or set of communities.” The definition of a digital library can be
given as a set of characteristics as follows:

The digital library is:
a collection of services
a collection of information objects
a supporting users with information objects
organization and presentation of those objects
available directly or indirectly
electronic/digital availability
A digital library is much more than just the collection of material in its depositories. It provides
a variety of services to all of its users. The basis of the digital library is the information objects
that provide the content in the form of digital resource. The goal of the digital library is to satisfy
user needs for management, access, storage and manipulation of the variety of information
stored in the collection of material that represents the holding of the library. The information
objects may be digital objects or they may be in other media but represented in the library via
digital means e.g., metadata). They may be available directly over the network or indirectly.
Although the object may not even be electronic, and although the objects themselves may not be
available directly over the network, they must be represented electronically in some manner.
There are many definitions of a digital library. The terms such as “electronic library” and virtual
library are often used synonymously. The elements that have been identified as common to
these definitions are:
The digital library is not a single entity.
The digital library requires technology to link the resources of many.
The linkages between the many digital libraries and information service are transparent to
the end user.
Universal access to digital libraries and information services is a goal.
Digital library collections are not limited to document surrogates, they extend to digital
artifacts that cannot be represented or distributed in printed formats.
The aim of a digital library may be to expedite the systematic development of digital resources
collection; the means to collect, store and organise information and knowledge in digital form.
A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print,
microform, or other media) and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored
locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. A digital library is a type of information
retrieval system.
In the context of the DELOS, a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, and DL.org, a Coordination
Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modeling Foundations, Digital
Library researchers and practitioners produced a Digital Library Reference Model which defines
a digital library as:
A potentially virtual organization, that comprehensively collects, manages and preserves for the
long depth of time rich digital content, and offers to its targeted user communities specialized
functionality on that content, of defined quality and according to comprehensive codified policies.

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