Book Byte and Beyond: Library without Walls

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilisation began, the step from the dark into the light of mind. The hand that hardened the clay tablets by baking like bricks created the library. Libraries have undergone a major change in modern times. They have been experiencing technological revolution that goes welt beyond anything that has existed since the invention of printing. Not surprisingly, the digital library with all that portends for the future of the book, but also with all that it implies for the kinds of information that will be collected and disseminated, will necessarily preoccupy those responsible for libraries in the new millennium. Every person who uses digital libraries will also expect to have access to the internet and the electronic library will look like any other Internet sources. Publishing –the paradigm-is in front line of exposure to change under the impact of information revolution. Some activities traditionally associated with publishing and other traditionally associated with libraries are being disentangled and recombined. The new configurations have wide implications for beyond the boundaries of the academic world in which many of them originate. Electronic mail and electronic publishing are only two of the more obvious application of the combination of computing and tale-communications which we describe as information technology’. The buzzword of the 1980’s is ‘end user’. The explosion of home computer market has resulted in an expanding population of millions who are comfortable at a computer terminal and in the last twenty years a number of databases and online services and cost to the nature of reading public itself is now up for re-examination. If information has become the new kind of capital, the significance of intellectual property is fundamentally changed. Much attention is now devoted to the information of social life: we are that we are entering an information age. that a new mode of information predominates, that we have moved into a global information economy. The general criteria for the development of information societies are clearly beginning to emerge. Many dreamers believe that networking and the Internet are just vanguard of technologies that will transform libraries into electronic libraries. While LANs (Local Area networks) and the Internet may be he wave of the future, the fact Is that OPAC(Online Public- Access Catalogue) and the electronic circulation are the real foundations of the ‘library without wall ‘. It is obvious that libraries being built today do not resemble those marble sanctuaries constructed in the early twentieth century. This is a work that shows how libraries have been transformed from ‘refuges’ from the external world , to places that reflect the social and intellectual values of specific societies.