Articles
· Will networking allow libraries of the future to be replaced by computers?
· xxxxxxxx
Will networking allow libraries of the future to be replaced by computers?
1.
Introduction
Library has long been a place
where collections are kept. The role of librarians is not only keeping these
collections, but also, the most important one, making them accessible. In early
library days, catalog cards were used as a communication medium between
librarians who put the books (collections) away, and users who sought for particular
ones. As collections got bigger, catalog cards were not appropriate anymore.
They required time to filing, time for users to walk across shelves when
changing search strategy as well as catalog shelves space. Technology was
brought to solve this: the OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues). As its name
implies, ‘online’ meaning computers were brought and network was set and
‘catalog’ cards were putting in digital form.
Computers never get tired of
repeated tasks like filing records or retrieving. It is a new communication
tool that is fast, but it can only deal with digits – digital inputs. By
this time, with networking, computers and digital information started to play
an important role in information world. In the seventies online databases began
to increase rapidly, in the eighties CD-ROM began to flourish, and in the
nineties, the Internet. Today it is used in all spheres of life for exchange of
information. Libraries now offer their OPACs on the Internet; online database
vendors, such as Dialog, and CD-ROM database vendors such as SilverPlatter,
make their databases accessible through the Internet; a national,
international, educational, research, commercial, and virtually all types of
organisations and institutions, make different types of information available
on the Internet, particularly the web (Chowdhurry, 1999). This phenomenon implies a
popularity of computer-readable information and distant access through
networks. Would computers and resources available over the networks replace the
conventional libraries as existing places?
To answer the query above, Library
services and information over the Internet must be compared. Then, information
quality and practicality will be analysed from the user’s perspective to draw
conclusion.
2. The library
To answer this question, we will
have to look at how we portray the library. This will include the library
services, reasons to stop the patron coming to the library, and the digital
library collection offered by the library itself.
2.1 Will library’s
information and services available ceasing users to come to the libraries?
Library never stops to develop
services to facilitate access to physical collections for their patrons.
Catalogues are made available for remote access as well as services such as
reservation and renewal services. Since library catalogues can be retrieved
remotely and publicly, users know where to get the desired item(s) and can
reserve through inter-library loan services. It stems from the idea of resource
sharing and library cooperation to maximise access for users’ greater benefit’s
sake. In
2.2 Will
digitised library collection cease users to come to use libraries then?
Many libraries began to digitise
their collections, however, these projects are mostly initiatives. They may
challenge financial support when operating in a long term since the projects
are expensive as can be seen in examples below. (Ramsden, 1997)
·
The
·
The US’s Digital Library
Initiative phase 2 (1999-2004) spent $60 million to develop more academic
digital libraries including the Library of Congress’s 5 million digitised books
project
·
The
·
The
Digital items are said to be
expensive to produce, but are cost-effective. Digital objects in a networked environment
hold the promise of lower cost access to information by greater number of
potential users than can provide in printed materials. It avoids cost of
printing and shipping multiple copies. In theory, once the fixed costs of
digitisation are incurred there is a zero marginal cost of providing additional
copy.
However, the creation of digital
collections has a potential that they won’t have to be expensive any more.
Digitise equipment prices are dropping. Would this be similar to the price
history that of the television, radio or other electronic products? It follows
the market demand, when more and more people already own the product, the
demand drops as well as the prices. As Manfred Thaller said in his article
…
With an emerging mass market of digital hobby photographers, digital cameral at
a professional resolution, today at 6 digit US dollar price, will become
achievable, presumably in the next 5 years. This means that with 2,000
exposures per campaign day, 1,000,000 page digitisation projects will be
possible with a limited budget and ober a 2-year or 500-day time frame. One
million pages seem like a lot. In case of printed books, it is equivalent to
2,000-3,000 collection volumes. This is substantial enough that a user will
profit from such collection and therefore be willing to learn how to use it… (2001)
Thaller emphasizes that the system
he is involved with have all been created at a low cost. However, digitisation
devices are only part of the digital library project budget and are considered
rather inexpensive. One most expensive proportion is that of staffing, in most
libraries, typically about half (Arms, 2000). For the electronic library to become a reality,
computer and networking skills will have to be more generally distributed throughout
the organisation. It will no longer be sufficient to have on board a small
group of technical experts. (Saunders
(ed.), 1993) libraries will then need to prepare staff for the
transition to the virtual library, train them as well as raise their salaries
when trained and skilled.
So far, creating digital library
is possible, but there are also technical aspects to be concerned: the speed of
delivery and durability
2.2.1 Speed & Size
There are many electronic document
formats: ASCII, page image and structured text. ASCII offers merits of
compactness (3-5,000 bytes per page), inexpensive capture and full-text
searching, but cannot incorporate graphics or special characters. Page images
are easy to capture, but each page requires 50,000-100,000 bytes. Structured
test formats – normally employing SGML – offer searching, can incorporate
equations and tables and require only 8-15,000 bytes per page, but are
expensive. Other method such as sing Adobe’s PostScript and PDF are useful but
within close user groups. The one suits users most should be the most expensive
one since we have to think of the network speed and bandwidth that would
deliver the document to users.
2.2.2 Durability
Digital information is fragile. It
is more easily corrupted or altered without recognition. (Hodge, 2000). The way to
ensure data persistence is either migrate the data from one software and
hardware to another or the creation of software that emulates obsolete encoding
format. Some online journals to which library subscribe seem to be also lack of
permanence.
2.3
Copyright issues
Copy
rights still remains main problem that most books cannot be converted into
digital forms. Although Thaller
said that copy right issues will be difficult to resist in the digital world (2001). Digital files can
be accessed by many concurrent users and so the pricing war begin to be a vital
strategy. Normal subscription of print journals can be varied from
Digital library is IT-related.
Training the staff for a transitional stage may take some time but still
possible. To create a digital collection themselves, copyrights problems may
not persue certain library in certain countries. Digitising collection
themselves take time and expensive. There is yet, another easier electronic
provision which arrised because of the ‘computer and network’ phenomenon.
Publishers to which the library already subscribe in print format started to
offer also a web version. Pricing is varied. The Journal of Biological
Chemistry for example, the print subscription costs £1500 and the Internet
access would cost an additional £900 per annual while some publisher may take
little or no additional charge.
3. The Internet
Now
we will focus on the other information sources, the library’s biggest energy, the
free information of the internet.
This part will focus on how and why people are spending more and more
time on the internet.
3.1
Coverage of web indexed by search engines
Unlike
library collections, whose library applies its particular collection policy for
its particular target users, the Internet has got everything. We are talking of
the Internet today as if it is everything we can find. Although there are
millions of information sources available on the Internet, the Internet is not
in itself a true single virtual library. Search engines available do not index
all existing sites. Some search engine, e.g. Yahoo, index web site using
people, but most use spiders, which index sites from submission and follow the
links to index other sites the site links to. The process takes time and this
takes time. Some sites are not linked to, some commercial online journals do
not allow the spiders to index the site, some sites are banned, thus there are
many sites that are not indexed or will never be indexed again.
It
is difficult to count number of constantly growing pages on the Internet, but
as of November 2003, according to http://www.cyveillance.com/web/newsroom/stats.htm, there are over 6 billion pages over the Internet.
Google who has the biggest index, as of September 2, 2003, covered only 3.3
billion indexed web pages – that was only 55% of total web sites on the
Internet. The web is simply getting too big for any single organisation or service
to catalog, irrespective of whether they use people or computers to generate
their indices (Baca (ed.),
1998).
Figure 1: size of search engines
over time
3.2 Web
search efficiency
Agents’
search engines are not as efficient as the traditional library’s. There are 2
types of web resource-locating tools: directories and searchengines.
The
directories use human to classify and index the web like the library’s
cataloguing process. This is efficient but costly and labour intensive. The
search engines on the contrary, use computer spiders, crawlers or robots to
index the web and follow links to index the linked web including scoring both
sites with additional keyword-matching techniques. This is quite efficient and
fast, but such free text search normally returns irrelevancy.
3.3
Quality of information
Many
digital library research projects are funded by government agencies and
national and international bodies, some are run by personal authors. This can
guarantee no authorization or correctness of information.
There is, however, another issue concerning the question of whether library can provide services and their collections electronically: the copy right and intelligence property concern. It remains a key issue in the acquisition process. The approaches to intelligence property vary on the type of organisation. ELINOR Project for instance, had difficulty with publishers and could finally worked with 22 publishers, 60 percent of whom were willing to grant permission to scan items without a charge. The remainder charged a storage license fee based on a combination of the price of the book, including the number of students told to read a recommended book, the software license limit for concurrent users, and the number of pages printed from the book. A few publishers required a royalty for printed pages. In total there are 8 different pricing models for the whole works operating concurrently at ELINOR (Ramsden (ed.), 1998). In case of national libraries, it depends on national information policies or legal deposit law of that country. In many countries, the law has not yet caught up in digital environment. PANDORA project, however, seeks permission from copyright owner while the Swedish and Finnish national library projects have an automated system and do not contact the owners. (Hodge, 2000). However, copyrights problem seem to be less severe as a recent study (in 2000) by Department of Information Science, Loughborough University on the future of copyright in an electronic environment has shown that “…copyright is unlikely to survive in its present form, and that attempts to strengthen it by means of increasing owner rights could be counterproductive…” (Hodge 2000: 42)
4. The Judgment
Now
we will focus on the other information sources, the library’s biggest energy,
the free information of the internet.
this part will focus on how and why people are spending more and more
time on the internet. Now we will focus on the other information sources, the
library’s biggest energy, the free information of the internet. this part will focus on how and why
people are spending more and more time on the internet. For the electronic
library to become a reality, computer and networking skills will have to be
more generally distributed throughout the organisation. It will no longer be
sufficient to have on board a small group of technical experts. (Saunders (ed.), 1993)
5. Conclusion
The
library has long been a place where information is stored and people went to.
Nowadays, even with technology, and that people are getting more IT oriented, to
my opinion, I don’t think networking will ever make library less superior.
Library will still be place that store latest print books. Many issues occur in converting all
books in the library to the digital form. Service to concurrent users will have
technical problems along with copyright issues.
With
traditional way of reading perception, on the contrary to the digital equipment
and software, I think library will remain with us until the end of mankind.
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