LibCognizance: Digital Library

Showing posts with label Digital Library. Show all posts

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Are libraries only for licensing ebooks? : bursting myth

LibCognizance bursting myth , Digital Library

In the digital age, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world badly. Libraries are working tirelessly to ensure their resources are available to those in need and looking for new ways of providing access to books, journals, and e-contents to their users. Libraries are more focusing on purchasing e-books as the situation demands.

Now the question arises: “Is the role of libraries only limited to licensing books, and licensing is the only way of providing access to e-books?”

Let's discuss this myth among the users of the library.

As a librarian, in the present digital era, "all we do is provide access to e-books" is not true. Then the question is: “What do libraries do?”

Libraries build collections that are not only for today's users but for the users in the future also. Just like today's users the users in the future are also going to look for the historical background of the information and then build upon it their research. They look for the old research, findings, and methods used before going on with their further work. Libraries’ collections help them in literature surveys and finding old theories, based on which they make their own hypothesis to work upon.

Libraries do the preservation, which is neither done by publishers nor by individuals to keep the work safe for future generations. Digitizing books also enables libraries to fulfill their age-old role as guardians of cultural posterity. Libraries are the safeguards of our cultural heritage like museums, galleries, and archives. The role of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions in preserving the nation’s cultural heritage can not be denied.

Most of the time, many self-published books can not find their ways to get in the library collection as e-books because they don't have the name of big publishers with them. These cover the uncommon topics of some local interests and from the authors of marginalized groups. The libraries are also acquiring these books and fulfilling the Ranganathan’s law of “every book has its reader”. So, we can say that Libraries are providing and preserving content that is important, not just content that is profitable.

I will also appreciate the valuable comments that add value to our libraries from library professionals regarding this. Bursting these myths and find new ways to bring out the more strengthened libraries is necessary to empower our libraries.

Experience the joys of the physical library right in your web browser with Open Library Explorer

LibCognizance Digital Library , New Trends in LIS

We all have seen the whole year of 2020 hit severely by the Covid-19 pandemic. All schools, colleges, universities, and libraries were closed. People were bound to stay inside their homes and study with the limited resources they have. This need brought a paradigm shift in the ways of access to the resources. Library communities across the world have taken many initiatives of making maximum resources available online to a large number of users during this pandemic. Open Library Explorer is one of these.

Open Library Explorer

The beta version of Open Library Explorer has just launched in December 2020 to receive your feedback. It is a digital interface that gives readers the feeling as if they are navigating a physical library. Readers can seamlessly navigate to the sea of books anywhere online with a better experience.

Key features:

Open Library Explorer presents you with the clickable shelves arranged category-wise like a computer and information science, religion, social sciences, philosophy, and psychology, etc.
The settings on the page allow you to choose between DDC or LC classification schemes.
In settings, we can also select the layout of books on the shelf like 3D, 3D Spines, 3D Flat that we want to see.
Readers have many options to select from the smart filter on the page to personalize their library.
Smart filters give the choice of converting your entire library to transform into a Children's library.

Open Library

Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive with a vision of making universal access to all knowledge with the contribution of librarians, authors, government officials, technologists, and book readers. Open Library is a non-profit, open-source, digital public library that lends millions of ebooks to its patrons. It is an open project that is open-source, open-data, and open for people who want to give their time and effort to building the site. The goal of the Open Library project is “one page for every book ever published anywhere in the world”. Even though it is a lofty goal, the team has gathered more than 20 million records from a variety of large catalog records and with a single contribution. All are welcome to contribute either a new entry or corrections to the existing catalog, just like in Wikipedia.

There are many roles in an Open library project you can contribute as a volunteer:

As a technical writer, storyteller, editor, video maker, marketer, researcher, and idea person, you can contribute to the Open Library project by making its resources discoverable and more accessible to readers.
As a software engineer, you can help fix bugs and build new features and programs that reach millions of book lovers.
As a translator, to make the knowledge available and accessible in other languages across the globe.
As a beta tester, you can test features and give feedback.
As a designer and user researcher.

As a librarian, how can you contribute to an open library project?

Librarians can help to improve and edit the library catalog. Data errors like misspelled authors’ names, missing book covers, and duplicated entries are identified and fixed. Librarians can work together and communicate using a Slack chat channel hosted by Open Library. Open Library’s engineering team has created many resources for librarians to empower them in fixing common data problems at scale.

References:

TRUST to build Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)

LibCognizance Archives , Digital Library

Digital repositories are information systems to collect, store, manage, preserve, and provide access to the content to the users.

TRUST to build Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)

Digital repositories are information systems to collect, store, manage, preserve, and provide access to the content to the users. The content is either deposited by the content creator owner or third party. The collection is managed and curated by using standard metadata tools. The repository offers a minimum set of basic services eg. store, search, and access to the content.

A Concept of Trustworthy Digital Repositories has been evolved to increase the capability of the repositories in long term preservation, access and, build trust among the users about the sustainability and usefulness of these repositories over time. Developing trustworthy digital repositories will require the integration of new methods, policies, standards and technologies in the process of digital preservation.

What is digital preservation?

Digital preservation is the process of managing access to digital material irrespective of technological advances in a long time, making the format and media to access digital content obsolete.

According to a working group within the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) to draft a definition for digital preservation during the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2007 Midwinter Meeting, “Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.” (http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/preserv/defdigpres0408)

It is important to develop the trust between the repositories and the communities that they intended to serve. The users must have trust in the repositories about their reliability and capability of managing the data they hold. Digital preservation is the process of managing access to digital material irrespective of technological advances in a long time, making the format and media to access digital content obsolete.

TRUST Principles

All efforts in the information world revolve around the one aim of making information Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. FAIR Data Principles are a set of guiding principles that provide the framework for scientific data management. (https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2018/08/fair-data-principles-for-scientific.html). To keep that data FAIR over time in digital repositories. And to maintain the trustworthiness of digital repositories in communities they serve, TRUST principles came into existence after several months of consultation with RDA (Research Data Alliance and discussion within the digital repositories community.

TRUST principles are a set of guiding principles to ensure trustworthy data management in digital repositories. TRUST principles are endorsed by Open Data Preservation Foundation and are recently published (May 2020) as an article for Scientific Data. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0486-7)

Open Preservation Foundation(OPF) is an independent, not for a profit membership organization, with a vision of open, sustainable preservation. It is an open-source community of digital preservation practitioners around the world. The organization provides practical digital preservation solutions and facilitates the best practices that support enduring access to digital collections.

According to Martin Wrigley, executive director of the Open Preservation Foundation, “We endorse these principles in our capacity as an advocate for best practice in digital preservation and in recognition of the fact that they are vital to securing a sustainable future for our digital information.”

Trust principles are a set of guiding principles that reminds the digital repositories stakeholders about the importance of developing and maintaining the repositories infrastructure in the way to cater to the needs of data to the community in a long run without any hindrance of technology change. TRUST is to build and maintain the trust of communities in the data repositories that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold.

Transparency

Transparency in the policies of any repository in areas like data deposition, data preservation, and data discovery. Clearly communicating the users about:

(i) policies in terms of the use of data holdings and digital preservation policies.
(ii) features and services that give an indication about the capability of repositories in holding sensitive data.

Responsibility

How responsible a digital repository is demonstrated by how well the data in repositories are managed by following metadata standards compliant with the community norms, which enhance the discoverability and usefulness of data. Responsibility involves:

(i) technical validation, documentation, quality control, authenticity protection, and long term preservation of data.

(ii) privacy and protection of sensitive information.

(iii)managing the intellectual property rights of data producers.

User Focus

Each digital repository should embed the best data practices being followed in its users’ communities. The user community involves the data depositors, users accessing data, funders, journal editors, institutions related to that community. User focus of the repository is demonstrated by:

(i) continuously monitoring and identifying the community changing expectations and needs with time and

(ii) evolving best practices to meet these requirements.

Sustainability

Sustainability involves ensuring:

(i) uninterrupted access to its data holdings for current and future user communities.

(ii) planning for disaster recovery, risk mitigation, and long term preservation of data. (iii) Securing funding to enable ongoing usage and to maintain successful rendering of services.

Technology

Technology involves:

(i) the fitness and maintenance of software, hardware tools to run a data repository.

(ii) proactive decisions and preparations to incorporate new tools and technical services to ensure uninterrupted access to data when technology changes and a mechanism to prevent, detect and respond to security threats

(iii) implementing appropriate standards, technologies, and tools for data management and curation.

TRUST principles give the benefit to both digital repositories and the user communities. A digital repository infrastructure built on these principles develops trust among user communities that they are capable of fulfilling their needs, protecting the data they hold, preserving for the long term, and enabling access to the data in the future also despite technology changes. The repositories based on TRUST principles are called Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs).

References

During Covid-19 libraries shifting online: crisis driven opportunity to innovate

LibCognizance Covid-19 resources , Digital Library

Covid-19 has changed the habits of the whole world in terms of living, working, reading.

During COVID-19 libraries shifting online: crisis-driven opportunity to innovate (pdf)

COVID-19 has changed the habits of the whole world in terms of living, working, reading. Not a single aspect of life has remained unaffected. Everything has changed the pattern to fight with Covid-19 and develop in a revolutionized way to prepare for the future.

The libraries are not exceptions. It has given the libraries a compulsive opportunity to scale up their online capabilities. If we talk about the role of libraries during a pandemic, then its role is indispensable.

Role of National Digital Library of India amid COVID-19 pandemic

LibCognizance COVID-19 , Digital Library

During this COVID-19 pandemic, the government has closed all the educational institutes for safety reasons and all e institutes are moving towards shifting their courses onlin e

Role of National Digital

Library of India amid COVID-19 pandemic pdf

During this COVID-19 pandemic, the government has closed all the educational institutes for safety reasons and all the institutes are moving towards shifting their courses online.

According to UNESCO, “more than 1.5 million students across the world are affected by the COVID-19 outbreak." As an education emergency response, UNESCO has launched the Global Education Coalition which is a multi-sector partnership to promote distance education for all learners. This will not only mitigate the immediate disruption in the education system but also try to establish new approaches to develop a more open and flexible education system for the future.

In this response, Digital libraries have emerged as a knowledge portal offering more and more free content (eBooks, journals, and other educational content.)Digital libraries not only provide access to the education content but also bring information technology, education and culture together and play a role in the sustainable growth and development of any nation. According to IFLA/UNESCO Manifesto for Digital Libraries. “Bridging the Digital Divide: making the world’s cultural and scientific heritage accessible to all.”

National Digital Library of India (NDLI)

Indian higher education system is the third-largest in the world and to establish e-learning in the education system, the National digital library is a key enabler to provide equity and assure the quality of education.

NDLI (National Digital Library of India) launched in 2018, is headquartered at IIT Kharagpur. It is a virtual repository of learning resources with a single-window search facility, initiated by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD). It hosts nearly 48 million records, including ebooks, theses, audio, video lectures, annual reports, technical reports articles, monographs, datasets, and web courses, etc.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, the NDLI has come up at the forefront of learning, to provide free access to the variety of content from the primary level to the postgraduate level across all disciplines. New steps have been taken by the NDLI to help students in this tough phase of lockdown due to COVID-19.

NDLI in collaboration with AICTE (All India Council of Scientific and Technical Education) has initiated a specially designed collection of e-resources for a specific group of students. Students can log in, register and get access to the resources at https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/

A JEE preparation module prepared by IIT Kharagpur is available on the NDLI platform for the students appearing in JEE Advanced 2020 to help their nonstop preparation for the exam.

Some features of NDLI:

It is currently available as an android app having a multilingual search facility.

The contents are available in all 22 official languages of India and in other languages also.

NDLI has content for the visitors of all age groups, from school and college students to the teachers, academicians, legal professionals, and even the learners with special needs.

It has a variety of resources types including e-books, theses & dissertations, audio, video lectures, annual reports, technical reports, articles, monographs, datasets, and web courses, etc.

NDLI Has covered all the disciplines like science and technology, history & geography, literature and music, philosophy and psychology, agriculture, religion, and law, etc.

It has all the contents from the different multidisciplinary government portals (NPTEL, NCERT, Krishikosh, Shodhganga, Librivox) integrated and available at a single portal.

A digital library of India is a digital library with a variety of contents in a variety of formats and for a variety of users with an aim of shifting the education system of India through online learning for everyone, to the advanced stage and thus contributing in the sustainable growth and development of India.

References:

Cited here:

Online-Platform-and-Covid-19-Pandemic-Situation.pdf (researchgate.net)

Archangel project: use of Blockchain technology in digital preservation

LibCognizance Archives , Blockchain technology

Archangel project: use of Blockchain technology in digital preservation

National archives of any country have a very precious collection of scientific, cultural, economic, social and historical digital records. In a rapidly changing digital world, it is important to save the national archives and transforming them with the change of technology. Long term sustainability of these digital records without any tampering, which questions the authenticity and originality of these records, is a big challenge to the Archival institutions and their governments.

History has many examples of expunging of records during major political unrest and happenings. To ensure the accessibility of digital records for long-term, the records need to be transformed into the other formats and transformation may result in a minor loss in fidelity of the original data. Currently, the archival practices are not able to cope up with these challenges.

Instead of cryptocurrencies and in the financial sector, many attempts are being done across the world to use the blockchain technology concept in other fields. Libraries are also running at this pace to find the possibilities in the various aspects of the library, digital preservation is one of them. To maintain the long term sustainability of digital records along with maintaining the authenticity and open accessibility of records to the public, the big leaders in this field along with the support of government have started the project using blockchain/ Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT): It is a technology behind the blockchain technology and other similar concepts.“It is an umbrella term used to describe technologies which store, distribute and facilitate the exchange of value between users, either privately or publicly. Blockchain is the first fully functional Distributed ledger technology, which became the most popular in the world.”¹

According to Wikipedia, “It is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. There is no central administrator or centralized data storage.”²

Archangel Project

The digital archives of any nation must be trustworthy for the public. To make sure the public about the policies of government regarding the safety

and integrity of records while migrating the data without any alteration in their originality, a 24 months project was started in June 2017 with the title “Archangel: trusted archives of digital public records” with the multidisciplinary partnership of University of Surrey, UK and a consortium of AMIs (Archives and Memory Institutions) stakeholders including the National Archives (One of the world's largest and oldest AMI preserving the digital records of UK Government) and Tim Berners Lee’s Open Data Institute (ODI).

Archangel project is to safeguard their integrity and open accessibility for future generations through the cutting edge technologies and models based on it. It involves the creation and evaluation of new prototypes of archival practice and their feasibility which also involves exploring the public attitude towards these new models and formulating the archival policies. The project uses DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) services.

Aim:

To ensure the integrity and safety and to promote open accessibility of digital records.
Creating and evaluating the models of new archival practice using DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) for long term sustainability of archival records.
Developing a novel cross AMIs model in which we have single DLT contributed to by multiple AMIs, across disciplines and nations. Its impact is not limited to AMIs but also on any Digital Public Archives and Research Data Repositories.
To formulate digital preservation and archival policies.
To build trust among the public about the authenticity and originality of digital records in archival institutions.
Finding out solutions for the transformation of digital records with the change of technology without any change and loss of content and maintaining their originality.

To know more:

https://blockchain.surrey.ac.uk/projects/archangel.html
https://youtu.be/7C65SXR_msM

References :

https://medium.com/nakamo-to/whats-the-difference-between-blockchain-and-dlt- e4b9312c75dd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/digital-archiving-context-everything/ (Pic Credit) The National Archives blog

Storj-Decentralized Cloud Object Storage for Digital Preservation

LibCognizance Cloud computing , Digital Library

Storj-Decentralized Cloud Object Storage for Digital Preservation

On moving ahead on the lines of my topics on cloud computing like “Cloud computing and its applications in libraries”, “Emulation as a service for digital preservation” and Blockchain technology and its potential use in libraries, here is new topic of Decentralized Cloud Storage, the technique which incorporates both the technologies: Cloud computing and Blockchain technology.

In this digital era, the libraries all over the world are engaged in finding various ways and technologies of storage and preservation of digital materials. The technologies that make data storage and retrieval easy, fast, safe and secure are the motto of our library leaders, technology developers. Again the Decentralized Cloud Storage technique is going to buzz in the data storage field.

Storj- Decentralized Cloud storage Technique: It is the first cloud storage technique which is decentralized providing end to end encryption of files stored on clouds and uses Blockchain technology and Cryptography to secure the online files.

Features:

1. It allows users to store data in a decentralized manner without any need of third party or storage provider, just like in blockchain technology in which files are globally distributed in segmented form.

2. Provides end to end encryption to files, that means only the owner of the files have that encryption key to encrypt the unencrypted files and see the content and thus safe and secure.

3. Fast access to files as the data storage and retrieval is not dependent on one server.

4. Storj labs are continuously working on the data security features with their own developed apps like MetaDisk (Web app) and DriveShare (Client app).

5. Storj builds the trust of the user in data storage by removing the dependency on vulnerable servers or any organization or employees dealing with the storage of users’ files.

6. Storj claims to be cheaper than traditional cloud storage because there is no need of data centres so the cost lowers the ⅓ the price of centralized cloud storage providers.

7. It is simple in implementing and scale along with the users’ needs.

8. Data on the network will be resistant to censorship, tampering, unauthorized access, and data failures.

As this technology is in its premature stage, so to discuss its use in libraries and how much extent it can be useful to the library storage and preservation purpose is very early. But in future, it can be used as the tool for long-term storage and preservation of large volumes of various resources in libraries like research data, scholarly articles, thesis, presentations and for archival purposes. The technology is cheaper than the traditional centralized cloud storage, so the library leaders and researchers can think about this technology to be used in libraries after depth analysis and finding the pros and cons of the technology.

To know more: https://storj.io/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STORJ