KOZHIKODE: Digital content is fast replacing printed books in libraries of higher educational institutions in the country, according to experts attending a five-day international workshop on digital libraries. The workshop began at the Indian Institute of Management-Kozhikode (IIM-K) on Monday.
"Digital content in libraries at premier educational institutions has already grown to an unprecedented 70-80% as against printed books. Many journals are now available only in digital format," said M G Sreekumar, head, Centre for Development of Digital Libraries (CDDL) at IIM-K and Unesco coordinator of Greenstone Support for South Asia.
He said there had been a paradigm shift in the way information resources were being handled by libraries following the massive influx of digital content.
"Traditionally, libraries owned books and journals they bought or subscribed to, allowing them to make best use of the resources. But digital publishing has changed those concepts. Libraries now only get the licence to use electronic information, and even this is issued for a prescribed period," he said. The digital libraries have now become the crucial component of global information infrastructure and offer new levels of access to broader audiences.
Inaugurating the workshop, Debashis Chatterjee, director of IIM-K, said the knowledge professionals of today should acquire the capacity and capability to foresee the future course of information and knowledge landscape in line with the new emerging world order.
Participants will be instructed on how to design digital collections of different publications in a variety of file formats. They will also receive the Greenstone Digital Library Software.
New DelhiWhen all information is available in an inch-thick mobile phone and news can be accessed with the click of a button, it looked like the humongous libraries could soon get converted into museums. On the contrary, the library has re-invented itself to keep pace with the times.
“Today’s library is not just a storehouse of information. In fact, it has no wall,” D Ramesh Gaur, librarian in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), said.
Like in the past, people still spend hours poring over books to extract nuggets of information in libraries. The number of transactions in Jamia Library of Jamia Millia Islamia has recorded a 58 per cent increase since 2003, while the membership of Delhi Public Library has gone up from approximately 35,000 in 2007 to 75,000 in 2012.
Explaining how libraries have managed to stay on course on the fast-moving information highway, several library officials said technology has helped these age-old institutions extend their reach through online journals, digitised archives and e-books.
These range from JSTOR, a popular online service supplying journals to students and institutions worldwide, to Manopatra Online, a database for law students.
Delhi University Library spends around Rs 3 crore annually on electronic databases of journals, a sum “impossible for students to pay”, one of its officials said.
Jamia Library has rapidly increased the subscription of online journals from roughly 2,000 to 6,200 over the past six years.
The process is more vigorous in digitisation of books, theses and primary material (manuscripts).
JNU Library, for instance, is on the verge of digitising around 8,000 theses and 3,000 rare books, while Delhi Public Library plans to digitise its precious gramophone records.
The past decade has seen an explosion of electronic cataloguing for the city’s biggest libraries. JNU Library has done away with the time-consuming method of manually searching for books. It has electronically indexed more that 6,00,000 books and periodicals — which can now be located in seconds. Delhi University Library, too, is almost through with the process.
“It is far more convenient than the manual catalog,” said Uday, a 20-year-old Political Science student in Hindu College. “More importantly, it saves time,” he said. REDUNDANT JOB?
Has technology made the librarian and his science redundant? Prof Makhdoomi, librarian in Jamia Millia Islamia, begged to differ. The advent of online cataloguing has made libraries more efficient, “but library science is not comparable to medicine or law”, said Makhdoomi, who has a PhD in the subject from the University of London. “As a specialised field, it has some scope,” he said.
Hindu College librarian Sanjiv Duttsharma said: “The essence of library science is the skill of organising information and books for readers. Technology will change, the basic principles will not. Instead of manual cataloguing, today we feed inputs to the database.”
There were libraries that have yet to fully embrace technological changes. A Hansraj College library assistant said it “still orders physical journals and has no online subscriptions”.
Technology has its limitations, too. Tarang, a student of History in Hindu College, said: “People still need the librarian’s knowledge and skills to locate a book or reference material from a particular report. Online catalogues are not enough.” JURY IS OUT
Opinion is divided over the old ‘storehouse’ and online information. For some like Harpreet Sudan, a student of International Law, he rarely needs to go to a library because “most of the stuff I need is available online”.
“Our teachers give us all the necessary material bundled up in a large book. We don’t really need to use the library,” said Uday, a student at Hindu College. Others like Gopinath, professor of History in Jamia Millia Islamia, said the library would prevail because it “remains the reservoir for in-depth knowledge”.
“The Internet is good for background checks, but the conscientious student still uses the library,” he said.
Chime, a 23-year old International Studies student in JNU, agreed.
“Scholarly stuff is available only in a library,” he said.
“Google and Wikipedia provide a general overview. For anything more than that, one needs a library,” Renukeer, a JNU student, said.
JNU International Studies student Sanghamitra considered the library a worthy place to visit because of the “availability of online journals and primary sources”.
Another plus-point for libraries is the environment they provide. Faraaz, a 20-year-old student of History in Zakir Husain College, uses Delhi Public Library to “avoid Facebook and Gmail, and concentrate on his books (which he calls hard copies)”.
Anjali prefers the quiet inside Delhi Public Library to the “loneliness” of her room at home to prepare for her SSC exams. “You get the urge to study when you see others studying,” she said.
In a surprise development, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar has appointed BJP leader and former MP S S Ahluwalia the head of a committee on digitisation of the Parliament library.
This is perhaps the first time that a BJP leader has been appointed to head a committee, other than the Parliament committees, at least in the current Lok Sabha. Confirming his appointment as the one-man committee “to suggest ways to digitisation of the Parliament library,” Ahluwalia told Deccan Herald that he was appointed by the Speaker, mainly because he has been the vice-president of the International Parliamentary Association of Information Technology (IPAIT) since 2002. The IPAIT is a worldwide inter-parliamentary institution aiming to promote multilateral cooperation in the field of Information and Communication technologies.
Ahluwalia said he was assigned to prepare a report on digitisation of the library and submit it to the Speaker. “ I have been involved in similar projects in IPAIT and probably that was why I was appointed,” said the MP, who lost the last Rajya Sabha election from Jharkhand.
“My appointment is on the lines of the head of the Bureau of Parliamentary Studies and Training and there is no time-frame to submit the report,” Ahluwalia said. While former Congress MP Rashid Alvi is the present chairman of the BPST, Renuka Choudhary and Margaret Alva were his predecessors. It was alleged that the appointments were made to help them retain the official bungalows which they are entitled as the head of BPST.
Ahluwalia, however, dismissed suggestions that the Congress was trying to lure him into the party with this post. “I completely deny this. This post has nothing to do with politics. As for bungalows and other perks, I don’t want to comment on small things. For me, the point is how well you are going to deliver the task on hand.”
The Lok Sabha has this to say about the library: “Parliament Library is the largest library in Delhi and second largest library in India after the National Library. The bibliographic details about the publications received after 1992 are available for online search. The library functions such as acquisition, processing and issue and return of books have been computerised. On-line access of library catalogue provides information about the author, title, subject and keywords-based searches.”
University of Mysore to take up digitisation of research work
Access to the repository of theses could be a mouse click away in the near future. The University of Mysore has inked a memorandum of understanding with Inflibnet to digitise its repository of theses as part of the ‘Shodhganga’ project.
Theses submitted to various universities are not available most of the time for reference due to various reasons. Comparing notes on research already done is a difficult proposition. And this has led to repetition of research on the same topics causing wastage of human resources, money and time.
To provide an open and easy access to Indian theses and dissertations to the academic community worldwide and to avoid repetitions, the University Grants Commission in collaboration with Inflibnet (informationlibrary network) has come up with an innovative concept called ‘Shodhganga,’ a repository of Indian theses.
The system
The theses submitted by research scholars of Indian universities will be uploaded on the repository. One can go through the entire gamut of theses of choice and refer other theses too, with the help of Shodhganga. Digitisation is also part of the project wherein universities are given funds to digitise old theses.
Plagiarism in research can be avoided to a great deal with Shodhganga. The universities will be provided softwares to detect plagiarism.
“Shodhganga will help avoid the repetition of research on the same topic and help research scholars to come up with findings of their own,'' said C P Ramesh, Librarian, University of Mysore.
Shodhgangothri, another initiative, allows researchers to get to know of ongoing research in Indian universities. Under the project, the synopsis approved by the universities will be made available to researchers.
Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they're changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren't defunded out of existence.
For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it's not changing fast enough. University students are caught in the middle. Their library experience must be like surfing: riding the edge of a moving wave, never quite cresting, never quite crashing. Such a state has to be thrilling, but ultimately exhausting.
One popular image of the library of the future comes from the cartoon Futurama. The temporally misplaced character from our own time, Fry, enters Mars University’s Wong Library with his friends. It contains the largest collection of literature in the universe. Zoom in on two CDs, one labeled “Fiction” and the other “Non-fiction.”
In many ways, the library of today looks much the same as the library of yesteryear. The card catalogs may be consigned to a basement storage area and the tables where they used to stand are studded with computers. But otherwise there are carrels and stacks, stairs and information desk, patrons and librarians.
Transition is underway: from a place where you go to get information to a place you go to create; and from a place you go to create to a service you use.
From kids to adults
Sarah Houghton, the director of the San Rafael Public Library in California and the blogger behindLibrarian in Black, said the little kids who come into her library expect three things.
“Every screen is a touchscreen,” she told Ars, “and when it’s not they get confused as hell. Kids expect instant delivery of everything. If you can’t get it right that second, it doesn’t exist. When you tell them that a thing they want doesn’t exist digitally, that it’s a physical thing and that’s it, it blows their mind. If there is some book they need to write a report on, say, Mayan culture, and it’s not online, they get mad.
“I’ve encountered people in their mid-late 20s who have that same expectation.”
Although many libraries are slow to change, the expectations of today’s children make that change a certainty.
From books to tools
One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.
"With enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”
“When libraries got rid of their physical card catalogs in favor of online catalogs, plenty of folks were worried that the experience of finding things, especially by physically browsing library stacks, would be diminished, ” Chris Bourg, Associate University Librarian at Stanford, told Ars. “(But) our catalog SearchWorks, has a feature which allows users to virtually browse the book covers of related items across 17 different campus libraries at once—something that would obviously be impossible to do physically.”
Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vaultblog.
“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogs and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”
Another change librarians have noted is the university library’s ongoing change to a multiuse space.
“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”
Green agrees.
“The nature of the academic library has always been to provide a platform for research, study, social activity and discovery,” he said. “I think, at its heart, the nature of the library will never really change, but the services that we provide and the role that we play in a student’s or researcher’s life will constantly shift.”
From building to service
Another denizen of the Stanford Library is Elijah Meeks. Not a librarian per se, Meeks is a “digital humanities specialist,” most recently the co-creator of the interactive ORBIS atlas of Roman history. He sees the university libraries in the future behaving like Google.
“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”
Steven Gass, associate director for Research and Instructional Services at MIT, sees the economics of the university library as militating toward a consolidation of collections. Satellites and branches have been closed all over the country and Gass sees the future of the university library as one of continuing consolidation of physical collections but mitigated with innovations like “embedded librarians.” These are librarians who live out in the different departments, labs and research centers of a university, responding to the specific needs of their scholars and students.
“Their job,” he told Ars “is to know what those are doing and be proactive and push out relevant material.”
The most extraordinary example of this concierge function may be the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. This library closed its physical doors to patrons at the first of the year. Patrons can download articles and other materials online or use its embedded librarians to access information, including books.
An important role that librarians are going to need to play, according to Gass, is that of online credibility coach. By and large, people know, or learn, often osmotically, what constitutes a credible source in a book. It is a safe bet that a book on Chaucer published by Oxford University Press is going to be more reliable than one published by Hustler. But how to do the same for material that is native to the Web?
“It is a shared goal among colleagues nationwide to promote good information learning skills,” said Gass, “how to identify quality information, to instill new academics with how to think about information, about its quality, to teach the 'tricks of the trade,' so to speak, in assessing accuracy.”
From the capital to the borderlands
This transition time is one of great opportunity for those involved in libraries, but all transitions, all borders and verges, are places of great vulnerability as well. Grand changes are possible here, but so are operatic failures. The future seems promising. It’s the present that worries some librarians.
“The myth that the information scholars need for research and teaching is, or soon will be available for free online is a dangerous one,” said Bourg, “especially when it is used as an excuse to cut funding to libraries. Right now libraries face enormous but exciting challenges in maintaining print collections and services where they are still necessary, while simultaneously developing strategies for collecting, preserving, organizing, and providing access to digital objects. I fear that if libraries across the nation don’t get the resources we collectively need to meet these challenges that we may be at risk of losing big chunks of our cultural record because of a lack of funding for digital collecting and preservation. “
If there is one thing that all librarians worried about, it was this: the de-funding of libraries. It has happened from the university research libraries all the way down to the neighborhood libraries that set expectations students bring when going to college.
Houghton traveled to Denmark last summer and visited the public library in a small, poor town.
“Their library was five times bigger than mine,” she said, “It had better computer technology, better everything.” The reason for that was simple, she said.
The future is vibrant—and it is working—in Colorado, where LJ
held its 12th Design Institute (DI), visited area libraries that
reflect and respond to their communities, and heard from both librarians
and architects about new library spaces for collaboration and creation.
It’s engaged in upstate New York, at Fayetteville Free Library (FFL).
There, Director Sue Considine and transliteracy development director
Lauren Britton have launched a Fab Lab for creation of physical
products—and those can be as high-tech as what comes out of a 3-D
MakerBot or as low-tech as the product and designs of a crochet group,
which can be made into a book to inspire others. (For more on maker
spaces, listen to the OCLC/LJ webinar, Made in a Library.)As many of us here at LJgear up to attend the
American Library Association conference in Anaheim, it seems an
appropriate time to reflect on the future of libraries. To quote
political muckraker Lincoln Steffens, “I have seen the future, and it
works.” Unfortunately, Steffens was referring to the post–World War I
Soviet Union, and we all know how that turned out. I feel a bit more
confident, however, about the future I see.
It’s all-encompassing at Skokie Public Library in
Illinois, which has a digital media lab for adults, not just teens or
college students. It’s confirmed in LJ’s Patron Profiles (going
online soon, in print p. 50–51), which reports that power e-users
“aren’t choosing the web over coming to the library in person…they are
choosing to do both.”
The message is the same all over: libraries are not just
warehouses for books but places of creation and community. They’re not
just information sources but maker spaces and social spaces. They’re
places that “make us want to linger,” as MS&R architect Traci
Lesneski put it at the DI at Denver Public Library last month. When Dan
Meehan, HBM Architects, asked the roomful of librarians how many thought
their libraries would have 25, 50, or 75 percent fewer print books in
ten years, most hands shot up at 50 percent.
Librarians have already started planning for that
change. Like Considine, they’ve begun repurposing their collection
development dollars. “Lauren [Britton] came knocking at my door—she was a
circulation clerk—with her idea [for a maker space] at a time we were
looking at our budget,” says Considine, “examining what we do, what we
should not do…. We want to help the community create content, not merely
consume it…to provide access [to tools to achieve] their hopes, dreams,
aspirations…. Librarians do that every day already.”
The particulars may vary, but the thinking is the same.
Find out what your users want and “what they don’t even know they need,”
said Louise Schaper at the DI, channeling Steve Jobs. (Schaper is
project lead on LJ’s New Landmark Libraries; the latest round of winners, academic buildings, will be revealed in July.)
Despite all the talk of downsizing collections,
libraries aren’t abandoning the book brand, or the collection. Joseph
Sanchez (instructional designer at Auraria Library at the University of
Colorado, Denver; a panelist at both the DI and the OCLC/LJ webinar; and a 2011 LJ
Mover & Shaker) has helped lead development of the ebook purchase
(not license) model at Douglas County Libraries, CO (see “Momentum Builds for DCL’s Ebook Model,”).
His vision goes much further, with a collection development policy that
would add the audio, video, ebooks, and “physibles” (digital objects
that can become physical) that the library user creates to the library’s
holdings. It dovetails with Britton’s idea at FFL. “In a read/write
culture,” she says, “[library users] write their own book and make two
copies: one to take home, one to be cataloged.”
In Sanchez’s plan, library users/creators donate one
copy to the library of origin to be cataloged and circulated. They can
sell the digital file or product to other libraries at fair market
value. “Here’s thousands of libraries willing to distribute your
creation if you agree to sell, not license it,” says Sanchez.
With minds like these in the library field, it’s no wonder the future looks like it really does work.
New Delhi, May 27: The government has launched an ambitious Rs 1,000-crore plan to digitally link 9,000 libraries across India.
The culture ministry has set up a National Mission on Libraries, headed by former Delhi University vice-chancellor Deepak Pental.
During the centenary celebration of the Oxford University Press, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said: “A young reader sitting in his village public library should be able to access books and information from across the world.”
This was one of the key recommendations of the Sam Pitroda-led National Knowledge Commission. The cabinet secretariat pushed for the proposal on March 20 this year.
Also planned is a survey of reading habits of Indians and to revive community libraries and reading rooms.
The 10-member panel includes former Infosys chief N.R. Narayana Murthy’s wife Sudha and H.K. Kaul, secretary of the department of higher education, ministry of human resource development.
The Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation will be the nodal agency for the mission. It will double as a secretariat for the mission and also help fund book acquisitions.
The mission will also be responsible for drafting a “national policy on library and information systems for India”.
“There has to be quality benchmarks for services to be adhered to by all libraries. Currently, there is no blueprint that you can follow,” said a senior official.
Source: The Telegrpah, Calcutta, Dated 28th May 2012
