Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries and institutional repositories are emerging as a crucial component of global information infrastructure adopting the latest innovations in ICT. The concept has brought a phenomenal change in collection, management and dissemination of information. Digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessed by computers. The collections can be accessed locally or assessed remotely through computer networks. The digital library initiative is probably the most promising development for libraries since the beginning of library automation.
Digital Libraries V/s Traditional Libraries
Digital libraries provide comparable or better services to traditional libraries at a relatively low cost over existing networks and tools like those used for the World Wide Web. Hence digital libraries contain volumes of information easy to access.

Digital Libraries History

The era of digital library perhaps emerged with the publication of e journals and e books, databases etc. and they are now becoming popular especially because of the fast emerging networks. The need for institutional repository arises out of a growing crisis in scholarly communication. Over the last twenty five years subscription prizes to scholarly publications have increase at a rate so significant that many libraries have been force to reduce their subscriptions; at the same time the funding for libraries have remained stagnant. Institutional repositories offer a strategic response both to the opportunities of digital e- network environment and the systemic problems in scholarly communications.

Institutional repositories are somehow link to the digital libraries in collecting, classifying, housing, cataloging, preserving and providing access to digital contents, analogous with the library’s traditional function of collecting, preserving, classifying and providing access to analog content. Repositories may be limited to one department, one institution or one department; or else it may be a consortium of several institutions. Development of institutional repositories has largely taken place in universities through open access and open archive movement.

Open Source Software

The establishment of institutional repositories. Several open source software are now available for free which are giving rise to digital libraries. So it is important for that digital repository system to ensure standard. As long as user defined metadata sets and multiple formats of digital content.
A typical digital library should support multilingualism i.e. multiple languages should be support in the user interface, in the meta data fields and in the digital content. The character encoding is of great importance in order for digital repository systems to be fully multilingual.

Hence Green stone is a software for building and distributing digital library collections. It produce by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato in the early 2000. So Green stone is now distribute and develop in cooperation with UNESCO and the human info nongovernmental organization. It is an open source multilingual software issue under the terms of GNU General Public License. There are several ways of finding information in green stone collections.