Library Without Walls

Digital libraries have emerged as a crucial component of global information infrastructure. The impact of digital library is now considered so widespread and general that all subject periodicals have featured articles and majority of national international conferences are focusing on various aspects of digital librarianship. The objective of this text is to provide a source suitable not only for university based library and information science courses on digital librarianship but also for library professionals in the field as well. Few days back, after an intense analysis, Curriculum Development Committee of University Grants Commission suggested a number of changes in the course curriculum of Library and Information Science Courses and thereafter added several aspects of digital librarianship as part of the bachelor and master degree LIS courses. While adopting these recommendations most of the Indian library schools departments have adopted all of these recommendation partially or fully.Presently most of the Indian text on digital library is just focusing on the definition or exploring the applications of digital library. These are covering procurement and maintenance aspects of digital documents and therefore guide an information officer for maintaining a parallel library of digital objects along with the paper based collection. While developing a digital library it is equally essential to convert the paper based worthwhile collection into the digital digitized collection for easy and wider access. This book is designed to offer not only a basic understanding of the issues and elements involved in creating and maintaining an ideal digital library but also presents a source book for the same. The complete text is divided into four parts. Chapter one provides an introduction to the field of digital library and some of the relevant issues like Indian digital initiatives etc. Chapter two deals with a discussion on all of the related aspects of digitization technology and covers process of digitization, establishment of digitization laboratory and variety of file formats for specified purposes. Chapter three presents an extensive note on various tools, essential for digitizing documents. It covers both software as well as hardware aspects of digitization process. Chapter four introduces World Wide Web. The thrust area of coverage is the problem being faced by the World Wide Web users and discusses the development and maintenance aspects. Chapter five addresses the topic of designing and development of World Wide Web. It covers a number of technologies along with their tools for the creation of an ideal multimedia based library portal over web. Chapter six discusses the importance of metadata. It is equally essential to make the available information easily searchable to the user and thus various metadata standards have been discussed. Chapter seven discusses about the artificial intelligence and its application tool, expert system. The main area of interest is the applicability of these concepts in the information profession. Chapter eight begins with a discussion on general purpose data mining and its techniques. It further provides various data mining application to the information profession. Chapter nine is the last part of this text and provides a brief explanation on the data warehousing concept. It presents various characteristics and process of data warehousing. Some of the models of data warehousing are also addressed.