Introduction:
We are all today living in the age known as the information age. The convergence of powerful computers with telecommunication technologies, over the past three decades, has precipitated the third fundamental shift in human history, known as the knowledge or information revolution. In this information age, the Internet has become the most popular mode of communication. The Internet is revolutionizing and enhancing the way we as humans communicate, both locally and around the globe. Indeed, the Internet is a network of networks where each network consists of computers linked to each other so as to allow the users of each computer to share information.
Internet Resources:
The term internet resources refer to various resources in an electronic format that provides information or an indicator of the information and are accessible over the Internet. The enhanced use of Internet tools in electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations, etc. has led to the influence of Internet resources to reach the various segments of society. The resources available in the Internet and electronic world are similar to the traditional sources of information and may be regarded as the electronic equivalent to printed resources but there are several other innovative products also which do not have their print equivalent. Moreover, they cannot be replicated in print format because of the limitations of the print media.
The basic requirement for Digital Library and E-Collections is a well-planned and tuned network environment. Networked Environment could mean a LAN to enable communication between the server systems and the local desktops or the front ends, an intranet, which is an ensemble of Local Area Networks (LANs) within an organization. Connectivity to the information superhighway -The Net- is a must to have access to the outside world. The bandwidth availability has to be properly ascertained and addressed to meet the varied user requirements. The performance of the Networked environment is determined by the factors of hardware (Switches, Routers, Servers, and etc.) and Software (Operating System, Application Programs). Designing and establishing the infrastructure for a suitable networked environment in a library is more important and could have a great impact on its information services. The networked environment should exist in the entire organization to serve its information requirements. Network accessibility to the users has to be guaranteed for the successful functioning of the digital library.
1. Content Creation:
Content creation has two distinct aspects. The first to convert existing non-electronic holdings to electronic holdings and the second to have a vision to be alert to have the soft copy (e-version) of all the newly generated documents (generated by the organization — reports, research findings, etc.) or acquired holdings. The most important and difficult and time-consuming aspect of a digital library is content creation. The process of selection, conversion, editing, cataloguing and publishing the digital data is most demanding and labour intensive. Libraries are forced to establish a content creation section that has to consist of both multimedia and scanning units. To digitize any document, the basic requirement is the need to have a suitable scanner. The Multimedia section can also go together for adding visual and sound information. Every effort has to be taken to acquire the electronic form of the publication from the author at the time of submission for archival. The published documents have to be digitized retrospectively, whenever e-version is not available.
There are varieties of scanners available from desktop to publication scanner. Libraries must select the suitable and adequate scanner. Some of the scanner types are
1. Desktop Scanner — for scanning small documents, photos, etc. Less Cost, Speed.
2. Image Scanner — for high resolution /quality scanning for images/photos.3. Document Scanner —for scanning bulk of materials, high speed, and high capacity. 4. Publication Scanner — for scanning bound documents.
3. Document Scanner —for scanning bulk of materials, high speed, and high capacity.
4. Publication Scanner — for scanning bound documents.
The necessary software to convert the scanned TIF images to OCR or PDF format is also required.
The most commonly used software products are:
1. Twain drives compatible scanning software for image capture.
2. Omni Page Pro / Adobe Capture for OCR conversion.
3. PhotoShop / Adobe Suite for editing, and
4. Adobe Acrobat Suite for Conversion to PDF.
2. Information Storage and Retrieval:
Digitized documents must be archived into a database and must be made available/accessible from the user desktops across the campus connected via an intranet. After being scanned, the readability of the document has to be checked and the quality has to be ensured. In case the quality is not satisfactory it has to be improved either by means of rescanning or scanning with better resolution. The scanned items must be reprocessed into the textual format by using OCR, which makes the documents “readable” by the system. After a quality check, the documents have to be catalogued/indexed and should be stored in the database along with the OCR information. The next step after archiving is to make the documents available for retrieval from the user’s desktops. For this, a good search engine has to be available which the users should be able to utilize effectively to find out the relevant documents by using the keyword searches. Desktop access can be provided by designing a suitable website with easier hyperlinks and can be published over the network environment by using web technology. Many file formats are available for representing electronic documents like PDF, JPEG, GIF, TIF, etc. Among these formats, PDF is faster and economical for online viewing and archiving. Adobe Acrobat tool can be used for obtaining PDF format of documents.
For citing this article use:
- Begum, S. S. (2017). A study on the usage of internet resources among engineering students in Madurai district. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/140954