Digital Repository

Introduction: We are in the age of digital environment where Information Technology (IT) has been used extensively to record, store, and disseminate the information in the digital form. The IT has almost converted the world into a global village. The revolution in the IT sector is influencing the information industry also. The Libraries are also changing to meet the demand put on it. The new generation whose demand for information is never meet is always demanding that traditional libraries should be develop as a well equipped and interconnected digital libraries. (Digital Repository)

The impact of the information age is stimulating the formation of new habits in all of us. It seems essential that we learn to ride the ribbons of change leading to the future. An imperative of these new practices is to try to speak to a wider audience, to try to close the gaps that have grown amongst us through distance and limitation of print world. The amount of information published in electronic format and the number of users accessing it to satisfy their daily information need is growing at a tremendous rate. This is the building block of the digital information age. Remarkably. though more information is easily reachable and in smaller amounts of time than a decade ago, it is becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to control and effective seek for information among the potentially infinite number of information sources available on the internet. Ironically, just as more and more users are getting on-line: it is getting increasingly difficult to find relevant information in a reasonable amount of time, unless one knows exactly what to get, from where to get it and how to get it. New emerging services are urgently needed on the internet to prevent computer users from being drowned by the flood of available information. Among the various digital information sources, digital libraries will play an important role not merely in terms of the information provided, but in terms of the services they provide to the information society (Fox and Marchionini, 1996). The provision of information resources and services is now readily available online via digital libraries furnished by a wide variety of information providers. Information is no longer just text and pictures. and is now available in a wide variety of multimedia formats. Digital libraries represent a new form of information technology in which content management. service delivery and social impact matter as much as technological advancement. In addition for digital library researchers there is a need to transform information access to knowledge creation and management. Developments in information technology have changed the concept of the library from one of print and paper media. Today we stand at a transition from the traditional library to a global digital library. The idea is to provide universal access to digital content available only in a digital library environment. In the Information Age, we require a digital library because the emergence of digital technology and computer networks has provided a means whereby information can be stored, retrieved, disseminated and duplicated in a fast and efficient manner. On a global level, DLs have made considerable advances both in technology and its application.

Definition and Overview of Digital Repository:

It is already said that here in this study digital repository and digital library is interchangeable used keeping in view that they are same in nature. Repository commonly refers to a location for storage, often for safety or preservation. A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing, is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles. They can be organized in several different manners.

A repository established by a particular university or other research institution is known as an institutional repository. It can be intended to collect and preserve — in digital form — the intellectual output of an institution, as PhD D theses. Eng D theses. pre-prints, post-prints, working papers, or technical reports. It can also contain the institutions digital library, the collection of printed and manuscript documents, public archives, & graphic material, originating from the institution or elsewhere, that the university has converted to digital form for use within the university, and generally available to anyone. It can also contain the administrative output of the institution, as reports, directories, and local archival documentation.

A well-developed example is the eScholarship Repository of the University of California Digital Library (URL: http://escholarship.org/)

• A repository established for the use of a particular academic department or laboratory is properly called a departmental repository. though the term institutional repository is also used. An example is the Repository for the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK (URL: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/).
• A repository established to collect and preserve material in a particular subject is called a subject repository; they can be organized by a government. a government department, or by a research institution, or be autonomous. The two best known are arXiv, for mathematics and physics articles or reports. and PubMed Central for biomedical journal articles.
• A repository for general use by scholars working in a particular country is a national repository, but such repositories can also be organized on a more local basis. In the UK, the British Library operates a national repository (URL.: http://wvvw.bl.uld) open to those who have no institutional repository.
• A repository can also be intended for a particular type of material, such as a thesis repository or a newspaper repository.

Deposit of material in such a site may be mandatory for a certain group, such as a particular university’s doctoral graduates in a thesis repository, or published papers from those holding grants from a particular government agency in a subject repository, or, sometimes, in their own institutional repository. Or it may be voluntary, as usually the case for technical reports at a university.

A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media) and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. A digital library is a type of information retrieval system.

The DELOS Digital Library Reference Model defines a digital library as:

An organization, which might be virtual, that comprehensively collects, manages and preserves for the long term rich digital content, and offers to its user communities specialized functionality on that content, of measurable quality and according to codified policies. The first use of the term digital library in print may have been in a 1988 report to the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. The term digital library was first popularized by the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994. These draw heavily on As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in 1945, which set out a vision not in terms of technology, but user experience. The term virtual library was initially used interchangeably with digital library, but is now primarily used for libraries that are virtual in other senses (such as libraries which aggregate distributed content).

Digital libraries have the potential to store much more information, simply because digital information requires very little physical space to contain it. Digital repositories/libraries provide access to much richer content in a more structured manner, i.e. we can easily move from the catalog to the particular book then to a particular chapter and so on. The user is able to use any search term bellowing to the word or phrase of the entire collection. Digital repositories/libraries can provide very user-friendly interfaces, giving clickable access to its resources.

Digital libraries, as Duguid and Atkins addressed in their report, must work with a highly diverse range of collections of digital objects, assembled on different principles by numerous contributors and continuously changing as more content and value are added to them. Equally, they must work with users who will be as diverse as society itself, with ever-changing needs and expectations…They must be useful to different communities for different purposes, at different times (Duguid and Atkins, 1997). Therefore, scalability interoperability, extensibility, federation, and compos ability are major issues for digital library systems.

Informally, Digital libraries can be defined as consisting of collections of information which have associated services delivered to user communities using a variety of technologies. The collections of information can be scientific, business or personal data, and can be represented as digital text, image, audio, video, or other media. This information can be digitized paper or born digital material and the services offered on such information can be varied, ranging from content operations to rights management, and can be offered to individuals or user communities. An essential technology component of Digital libraries is that they are networked, meaning that access is increasingly becoming shared and collaborative. The fundamental purpose of a digital library must be to provide access to information along with appropriate reference tools for identifying and evaluating the possible sources and types of information. Thus, the many kinds of information that constitute the intellectual capital of post-baccalaureate learning must be digitized and organized in a manner that can be searched intelligently and reliably, using technologies that do not require undue technical training. Perhaps most difficult of all, a sustainable business model to support the digital library must be identified. Digital libraries can be explored in an information society from two not entirely compatible dimensions: intellectual property and evolving technologies to serve communities of learning.

A new conservation is necessary among libraries, library users and officials responsible for funding libraries to ensure that the library of the future serves the intellectual needs of diverse users and fields. This is in some sense a collection. This may be personal, group, organization or widely public, it may be a combination of physical and electronic, or purely online, it may be represented by hyperlinks: it may be mutable. But an unstructured, un-index aggregation of documents (such as the web writ large) dose not constitute a library. The collection is not exclusively bibliographic or exclusively a set of pointers to other materials but includes full form online material encompassing a large of media and intended uses, such as articles, books, simulations, formulas, datasets, financial or medical records newsgroup archives, e-mail messages, sound clips, images and the like. As does a physical collection, there is a concern to link audience, group, patron or community with attributes of the collection in an efficient, satisfying manner. However, because of the unique characteristics of online media, collection development may also include group or community develop next or at least provide a virtual space for linking those with common interests. There is in some sense a set of services (human and computer based) that links people to one another. The technologies involved in digital library services are those that support document creation, retrieval, transfer, dissemination. manipulation and management of the digital library as well as social interactions: and there is in some sense an institution in which digital library collections, services, and social interactions are embedded. The institution may be geared exclusively to the creation and maintenance of the digital library itself, or it may be any type of organization that provides digital library tools, resources, and services to support other activities (Bishop and Star, 1996).

Bernie Hurley, the Director for Library Technologies at U.C. Berkeley quoted in Digital Library Technology Trends (Sun Microsystems, August 2002. www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/whitepapers/pdf/digital_library_trends.pdt) that “Digital libraries are different [from traditional library automation] in that they are designed to support the creation, maintenance, management, access to, and preservation of digital content”. Sun Microsystems defines a digital library as “the electronic extension of functions users typically perform and the resources they access in a traditional library”. These information resources can be translated into digital form, stored in multimedia repositories, and made available through web-based services. The emergence of the digital library mirrors the growth of e-learning (or distance learning) as the virtual alternative to traditional school attendance. As the student population increasingly turns to off-campus alternatives for lifelong learning, the library must evolve to fit this new educational paradigm or become obsolete as students search for other ways to conveniently locate information resources anywhere, any time.

The Digital Library Federation (DLF), a consortium of libraries and related agencies, defines a digital library as that “Digital libraries are 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 and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities”.

Research on digital libraries began about more than decade ago and a number of DLs were created as a result. Much of the research during the initial stages was on digitizing existing sources. Indeed, DLs answer queries crudely rather than. for instance, learn the long-term or short-term requirements idiosyncratic to a specific user or, more general, specific to an information-seeking task. In practice, what happens is that users use the same information resources over and over and would benefit from customization in a broad sense: the time consuming effort that the user put in searching documents and possibly downloading them from the DLs is often forgotten and lost? Later, the user may wish to perform a search on the same topic to find relevant documents that have, for example, appeared since the last time a search was performed. This requires a repetition of the manual labor in searching and browsing to find the documents just like the first time. As DLs become more commonplaces and the range of information they provide services upon increases. users’ expectations will increase and users’ are expecting more and more sophisticated services from their DLs. A “quick and dirty search” facility is normally an integral part of any digital library, but users’ frustrations with this increase as their demands become more complex and as the volume of information managed by digital libraries increases. There is a need for DLs to move from being passive with little adaptation to their users, to being more proactive in offering and tailoring information for individual users. If a DL is not personalized for individuals or communities of users then a digital library is defaulting on its obligation to offer the best service possible.

The emerging generation of DLs is more heterogeneous along several dimensions. The collections themselves are becoming more heterogeneous. in terms of their

of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities”. Research on digital libraries began about more than decade ago and a number of DLs were created as a result. Much of the research during the initial stages was on digitizing existing sources. Indeed, DLs answer queries crudely rather than. for instance, learn the long-term or short-term requirements idiosyncratic to a specific user or, more general, specific to an information-seeking task. In practice, what happens is that users use the same information resources over and over and would benefit from customization in a broad sense: the time consuming effort that the user put in searching documents and possibly downloading them from the DLs is often forgotten and lost? Later, the user may wish to perform a search on the same topic to find relevant documents that have, for example, appeared since the last time a search was performed. This requires a repetition of the manual labor in searching and browsing to find the documents just like the first time. As DLs become more commonplaces and the range of information they provide services upon increases. users’ expectations will increase and users’ are expecting more and more sophisticated services from their DLs. A “quick and dirty search” facility is normally an integral part of any digital library, but users’ frustrations with this increase as their demands become more complex and as the volume of information managed by digital libraries increases. There is a need for DLs to move from being passive with little adaptation to their users, to being more proactive in offering and tailoring information for individual users. If a DL is not personalized for individuals or communities of users then a digital library is defaulting on its obligation to offer the best service possible. The emerging generation of DLs is more heterogeneous along several dimensions. The collections themselves are becoming more heterogeneous. in terms of their creators, content, media, and communities served. The range of library types is expanding to include long-term “personal” DLs, and well as DLs that serve specific organizations, educational needs, and cultural heritage that vary in their reliability. authority, regency, and quality. The user communities are becoming heterogeneous in terms of their interests, backgrounds, and skill levels, ranging from novices to experts in a specific subject area. The growing diversity of digital libraries, the communities accessing them, and how the information is used requires the next generation of DLs to be more effective at providing information that is tailored to a person’s background knowledge, skills, tasks, and intended use of the information.

Rachel Heery and Sheila Anderson in their work “Digital Repositories review” have shown that an increasing range of activity areas within the information environment refer to their deposited content collections as ‘repositories’. In order to encourage communication across activity areas, and promote interoperability, they felt need to define the characteristics of ‘repositories’ and sought the coherence of a common approach. Increasingly widespread use of a term goes hand in hand with increasing diversity of meanings. Repositories are ‘collections of digital objects’ but what makes repositories distinctive from other collections of digital objects such as directories. catalogues, databases? What are the defining characteristics of a ‘repository’? As with other terms that have been popularized in the digital world (portal, architecture… ) some qualification is required: is the repository managed as an institutional repository or a subject repository? What is the content of the repository – an e-prints repository. a data repository, a learning object repository? Is the underlying purpose of the repository for preservation, access, or data management?

They proposed that a digital repository is differentiated from other digital collections by the following characteristics:

• Content is deposited in a repository, whether by the content creator, owner or third party.
• The repository architecture manages content as well as metadata.
• The repository offers a minimum set of basic services e.g. put, get, search. access control.
• The repository must be sustainable and trusted, well-supported and well-managed.
• Enhancing access to scholarly communications has been a main driver for establishing repositories, both institutional repositories (in particular e-print archives) and subject based archives. Many, though by no means all. repositories support ‘open access’ at least in part. Open access repositories can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
• The repository must provide open access to its content (unless there are legal constraints).
• The repository must provide open access to its metadata for harvesting.

The underlying motivations for establishing repositories also differentiate them from other collections. Repositories form an intersection of interest for different communities of practice: digital libraries, research, learning, e-science. publishing. records management. preservation.

Within these communities the motivation for focusing on repositories differs somewhat, and the key services that repositories might provide range over several functional areas:

• Enhanced access to resource.
• New modes of publication and peer review.
• Corporate information management (records management and content management systems).
• Data sharing (re-use of research data, re-use of learning objects).
• Preservation of digital resources.

They considered Lynch’s definition of repositories where they saw an emphasis on the significance of these services rather than on a particular software product or type of content: ‘a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.’ (Lynch, 2003).

In the Internet era, digital repositories represent completely new information infrastructures and knowledge environments. Integrating and utilizing the newest computer and communication technologies and digital content, the digital repository builds huge extendable and interoperable collections.

Scholarship and scholarly communication are changing. Digital repository or library. whatever, it held information in digital form and or it is the digital face of traditional library.

Types of Digital Libraries:

The term digital library is diffuse enough to be applied to a wide range of collections and organizations, but, to be considered a digital library; an online collection of information must be managed by and made accessible to a community of users. Thus. some web sites can be considered digital libraries, but far from all. Many of the best known digital libraries are older than the web including Project Perseus, Project Gutenberg, and ibiblio. Nevertheless, as a result of the development of the internet and its search potential, digital libraries such as the European Library and the Library of Congress are now developing in a Web-based environment. Public, school and college libraries are also able to develop digital download websites, featuring eBooks, audio-books, music and video.

A distinction is often made between content that was created in a digital format. known as born-digital, and information that has been converted from a physical medium, e.g., paper, by digitizing. The term hybrid library is sometimes used for libraries that have both physical collections and digital collections. For example. American Memory is a digital library within the Library of Congress. Some important digital libraries also serve as long term archives, for example. the ePrint arXiv. and the Internet Archive.

A. Academic Repositories:

Many academic libraries are actively involved in building institutional repositories of the institution’s books, papers, theses, and other works which can be digitized or were ‘born digital’. Many of these repositories are made available to the general public with few restrictions, in accordance with the goals of open access, in contrast to the publication of research in commercial journals, where the publishers often limit access rights. Institutional, truly free, and corporate repositories are sometimes referred to as digital libraries.

B. Digital Archives:

Archives differ from libraries in several ways. Traditionally, archives were defined as:

1. Containing primary sources of information (typically letters and papers directly produced by an individual or organization) rather than the secondary sources found in a library (books, etc);

2. Having their contents organized in groups rather than individual items;

3. Having unique contents. The technology used to create digital libraries has been even more revolutionary for archives since it breaks down the second and third of these general rules. The Oxford Text Archive (URL: http://ota.ands.ac.uld ) is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic physical primary source materials.

Original Reference Article:

• Patra, C. (2010). Digital repository in ceramics A Metadata study. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/212642