Document Management in Digital form.
In this section, a general discussion on document management in digital form is attempted. This may be applicable both in the case of digital libraries and digital archives as well as libraries interested in optimally managing their digital collection before rendering useful services from such collection. Some of the purposes of digital libraries that are of direct concern to document management are:
- Collect, store and organize information and knowledge in digital form.
- Promote economic and efficient delivery of information.
Options in library:
Some of the activities in the library concerned with managing digital documents may include:
- CD-ROM Networking: Networking CD-ROMs with jukebox/Cd tower or high capacity hard disk mirroring to serve bibliographic or full text databases, electronic supplements with printed books, CDs cut in house out of publications/ reports of internal activity.
- Web access of journals: Current journals could be made accessible from the publisher’s Web sites either through login and passwords or by specific IP addresses of the institution, with/ out paying extra fee on subiscriptions. There are also options to join consortia based electronic access of primary resources through MHRD’s INDEST consortium, UGC Info-net Project, etc. Seeing the rapidity by which library automation and CD-ROM technology percolated in the country, there may be many more consortia.
- Virtual libraries: Links to free web resources on focus area of the information.
- E-Books: Free books in electronic form, mostly found in PDF format.
Steps in Digital Document Management
The basic functions in Digital Document Management are:- Identification and collection of contents to be digitized.
- Classification and digitization of these contents.
- Designing search engines to selectively search and access the contents.
- Publishing contents digitally for end-user access.
Each of these functions involves certain subtasks like:
- Transforming printed information into digital form.
- Storage, retrieval and handling of “easy-to-use” electronic information.
- Converting data from divers media or formats into digital format.
- Classification techniques for improving retrieval efficiency.
- Managing devices for large massive storage, with multilevel hierarchical storage structures, supporting differing speed storage devices and varied capacity processors.
- Editing and formatting of contents in different formats such as, HTML, XML, PDF, JPEG, MPEG, etc.
- Browsing and querying facilities for content based retrieval.
- Security of delivered contents by different cryptographic/ encryption methods and appropriate firewall mechanisms and access methods through password / IP authentication of clients.