Corporate Digital Library

Corporate Digital Library

Knowledge is every organization’s largest asset, yet it can be an overlooked and underutilized resource if not managed effectively and efficiently. Successful companies/organizations know that knowledge in action gets better results, accelerating the rate of learning, innovative ideas, insights and culture: cutting down the risks of not knowing and repeating mistakes: and retaining knowledge assets when people move, leave, or retire.

In a corporate environment scientist, research associates, managers and other employees are bombarded with an almost constant stream of data every day. According to Derbyshire (2011) “Scientists have worked out exactly how much data is sent to a typical person in the course of a year — the equivalent of every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every single day”. The overload of data is making knowledge centre or digital library progressively more important. Three key reasons why actively managing knowledge is important to a company’s success are: facilitates landscape and competition mapping: facilitates decision-making capabilities; build learning organizations by making learning routine; provide research insights; and stimulates cultural change and innovation.

Access to digital materials as usual continues to be issues of great significance in the development of digital libraries considering the access barriers faced by the country like India, where the access and visibility are the major bottleneck to counter with. The proliferation of e-information in the networked digital environment poses challenges as well as opportunities for the country as well as corporate organizations cumulatively. The corporate library system encompasses of knowledge resources and services that supports innovation, invention and learning process. Service is the key driver of any library system, as the whole purpose of the library is to serve user with the right information at a right time in a right format coined by the reverend Indian LIS philosopher Dr. S R Ranganathan. The following are the areas where corporate digital library mainly focused to provide their services and facilities.

• Business Intelligence System (BIS)
• Data/Information Warehouse (DIW)
• Decision Support System (DSS)
• Executive Information System (ExIS)
• Management Support System (MSS)
• Multidimensional database (M-DDB)
• On-line Analytical Processing (OL-AP)
• Structured Document and Imaging Database (SDID)
• Visual Information Access and Analysis (VIAA)

In general a corporate knowledge centre or digital library process involves: resource capture; resource organizing; resource storage; resource distribution. Ultimately, successful library management results in the best possible means to apply and leverage the resource or blowledge that has been captured, organized, stored and shared. In effect, all the resources will be used as part of the company’s core business and competitive intelligence strategy. According to Abdul Kalam (2004), “The systematic process of fmdine, selecting, organizing, distilling and presenting information, improves an employee’s comprehension in a specific area of interest. Knowledge Centres helps an organization to gain insight and understanding from its own experience. Specific knowledge management activities help focus on organization on acquiring, and utilizing knowledge for problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning and decision making. It also prevents intellectual assets from decay, adds to film intelligence and provides increased flexibility”.

For centuries, libraries and librarians have been using printed materials made available to the user for use by the efforts of the publishers and associated book supply chains. With the rapid succession and subsequent widespread use of information technology support systems like desktop, laptop, palmtop, iPod, iPad, mobile devices and networking systems like Internet, LAN, optical, Wi-Fi and cloud. There is an amazing expansion in the scope of the library system. These information and communication technology tools have transformed the way libraries are collecting, organizing, storing and disseminating of information which was not even imaginable yesteryear’s. At the same time these new technologies have provided an opportunity for users to adapt to the digital materials / resources easily and also expanded the ability to generate and disseminate information in digital format both online as well as offline.

According to Shiri (2003) the digital library federation defines digital libraries as: organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily available for use by a defined community or set of communities.

According to Pandey (2011) the terms such as ‘digital library’, ‘electronic library’, ‘virtual library’, web-library’, or ‘on-line library’ have been used synonymously to represent the same concept. Though the terms used synonymously to represent the same concept, the terms are used differently by different authors in the literature, the central theme of the terminology remains focused on digital content of the documents. A digital library is a library consisting of digital materials and services. Digital services are services that are delivered digitally over computer networks. It maintains all, or a substantial part, of its collection in computer-accessible form as an alternative, supplement, a complement to the conventional printed and micro-form materials that currently dominate library collections.

The concept of the digital library was established widely after DLI-I (Digital Library Initiative Phase-I) and DLI-II project. Since the beginning of 21stcentury, there has been an increase in the number of research studies on digital libraries. An article by Borgman (1999) titled “What are digital libraries? Competing visions” opened the eyes of librarians towards the digital library concept. Development of institutional repository software like Greenstone, Dspace and Eprints., have paved way for librarians think, act and serve digitally and operate on the basis of open source concepts.

Copyright has been called the “single most vexing barrier to digital library development” (Chepesuik, 1997). The existing paper-based concept of copyright breaks down in the digital environment because the control of copies is lost. Digital objects are less fixed, easily copied and remotely accessed by multiple users simultaneously. The trouble for libraries is that, unlike private businesses or publishers that own their information, libraries are simply caretakers of information, as they don’t own the copyright of the material they hold.

Another important issue is preservation of information for the posterity. Technical obsolescence is the major issue in the preservation of digital materials/resources. When considering digital materials, there are three types of “preservation” as proposed by Chepesuik (1997) are the preservation of the storage medium; the preservation of access to content; preserving digital information; the preservation of fixed-media materials through digital technology.

Original Reference Article:

• Unnikrishnan, G. (2016). Copyright in corporate digital libraries in India problems and prospects.