Competencies and skills of a librarian in the management of digital libraries
The competency of a digital librarian is represented by different sets of skills, attitudes and values that enable a digital librarian to work as digital information professional or digital knowledge worker and digital knowledge communicator . One is the ability to manage the digital libraries and digital knowledge in terms of digital knowledge management. The following are the skills and competencies required for a digital librarian in the management of digital information systems and digital libraries:
1. Internet knowledge
2. Multimedia, digital technology, digital media processing
3. Digital information system, online, optical information
There are additional skills that the librarian should develop. One is the ability to think in terms of knowledge networks:
(1) Internal networks: personal networks; project teams, competence groups, GroupWare; internal digital knowledge resource; intranets.
(2) External networks: external knowledge resources; external personal networks; customers, suppliers, partners; extranets.
Role of libraries in managing digital library
Generation of digital libraries requires the librarians to be essentially a type of specialist librarian who has to manage and organize the digital library, handle the specialized tasks of massive digitization, storage, access, digital knowledge mining, digital reference services, electronic information services, search co-ordination, and manage the archive and its access. Librarian acts as guardian of the information superhighway/the universal digital library or the global digital library and acts as a symbiotic human-machine guru.
Digital libraries are electronic libraries in which large numbers of geographically distributed users can access the contents of large and diverse repositories of electronic objects.A digital library is understood to have the information stored predominantly in an electronic or digital medium. The digital information collection may include digital books, digital scanned images, graphics, textual and numeric data, digitized films, audio-video clips, etc. A digital library is expected to provide access to the digital information collections.
A digital library may be considered to be any of these:
(1) Machine-readable data files;
(2) Components of the emerging National Information Infrastructure;
(3) Various online databases and CD-ROM information products;
(4) Computer information storage devices on which information resides;
(5) Computerized networked library systems.
The characteristics of digital libraries are the storage of information in digital form, direct usage of communication networks for accessing, obtaining information, and copying by either downloading or online/offline printing from a master file.
Role of librarian in managing digital information
A librarian, a type of specialist information professional who manages and organizes the digital library, combines the functionality for information, digital reference services, electronic information services, representation of information, extraction, and distribution of information, and retrieval. The ultimate goal of librarian is to facilitate access to information to the end users.
What will be the role of a librarian in the future? It seems to fit in with the notion that the library will disappear as an institution. The Internet will become a significant force in the information world. A different view of the future might be one where a “digital library'' is more like a “knowledge warehouse'', where a complex system of professionals whose expertise supports access to information acts as an intermediary to a variety of digital and other sources .Librarian is no more simply a custodian of reading material, but she/he is the collector and evaluator of information. Librarian need to possess knowledge in the field of computer, networking, information analysis, Internet surfing techniques, digital sources, various web sites and organization of data embedded in them. They can update the knowledge themselves by self-learning, creative learning team approach etc. Thus librarians are being given various new names such as encoder, knowledge manager, Information scientist, resource manager etc. and so on and so forth the name is transforming day by day with the advent of technology.
Librarians are required to :
.Librarian’s role:
1. Guardian of information superhighway
2. Guardian of the global digital library/ the universal digital library
3. Digital librarian acts as symbiotic human-machine guru
4. Navigation, browsing and filtering
5. Multimedia searches and indexing
6. Knowledge and data mining
7. Search and retrieval co-ordination
8. Librarian's interface functions and roles in the management of digital library
9. Digital information accesses
There are various tools available to use in digital information systems and they facilitate in accessing, searching, browsing, navigating, retrieving, indexing, storing, organizing and dissemination of digitized information. The list given below is the digital information sources:
· Online public access catalogues (OPACs):
· Wide Area Information Services, Web browsers, discussion groups.
· Digital networks/networking: BLAISE, MEDLINE, NICNET, DELNET AGRIS, INIS, all sorts of networks.
· Hypertext/Hypermedia.
· Multimedia networking protocols.
· Electronic publishing tools.Electronically fax/commercial vendors.
Telephone/TV
Present library is facing many problems that is – allocation of budget, lack of staff especially skilled staff, non availability of documents, no. of copies, library security in open access system, limited library hours, life of print materials etc. With advancement of technology, the libraries are moving towards digital resources, which are found to be less expensive and more helpful for easy access. These are helpful especially to distant learners who have limited time to access the libraries from outside by dial up access by the commonly available electronic mode of access to resources mainly through CD-ROMs, OPACs and Internet etc. If the future libraries are to survive, they have to be switched over to electronic mode because the information is fast changing and mostly resources are born digitally. Components of a digital information system may include:
(1) Personal library system for the users;
(2) Organizational library system for serving groups of individuals;
(3) New users as well as existing local or distant database users;
(4) Database servers to handle remote requests; and
(5) A variety of system functions to coordinate, manage the entry and retrieval of digital information.
Computer based information system for acquiring, storing, organizing, searching, distributing and displaying digital materials for end user access. Digital libraries are electronic libraries in which number of geographically distributed users can access the contents of large and diverse repositories of electronic objects. In an era of digital information, electronic technology, the tremendous growth of WWW's, digital libraries offer a huge range of multimedia information, everything from movies, speeches, images and photos to sounds, text and beyond. The amounts of online, CD-ROMs and other digital sources of information are exploding and infrastructure for accessing material improves almost daily. In building the next generation of digital libraries, multimedia and artificial intelligence will play several important roles. The multimedia nature of digital libraries requires librarians for the locating of relevant information efficiently and cost effectively and disseminating it in a wide variety of formats of digital information system. The advent of digital libraries presents a plethora of challenges and opportunities to the librarian. In the digital library context, the role of the librarian is primarily to manage the organization of such collections: digital librarianship. Clearly, the complexity of the digital library infrastructure determines the human involvement
Digitization is an electronic process of converging information from a print format to a digital format. It involves the scanning of the print material into digital. Digitization is done not only for preservation or archival purposes but also, rather more, on account of the other advantages and uses of the same. A digitized work can easily be transmitted to members of a library through the Net. Transmission of images and text through the Net is a communication to the public and requires the permission of the copyright owner, if the work is in the copyright regime.
Learning outcome:
From this topic, I have gain knowledge on role of libraries and librarians in managing digital information. Librarian acts as guardian of the information superhighway/the universal digital library or the global digital library and acts as a symbiotic human-machine guru. Digital library is now implemented in most librarians, thru this lesson, I will able to implement/ suggest this to my organization.
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