University Digital Library: An initiative to improve Research, Teaching & Services

With the advent of Information technology, Libraries are moving into the digital library age, an
environment where technology is leading change and where libraries need to integrate a range of
components in order to build their own landscape. New information resources, the internet and
networking boom, the emergence of e-commerce and increasingly sophisticated users are all
dictating the shape of the digital library of the future. Hence, there is a need for University
Digital library (UDL). UDL system is a digital library system that supports the creation of
research and teaching resources from local, international and internet resources. The system will
enable the university community to build their own digital collections, provide access to digital
collections and facilitate the integration of digital resources into the core of teaching and
learning. The UDL system would afford the university to build significant and functional digital
collections of large structured documents for teaching and research from both local and internet
resources and combine these with existing resources. The system would be able to provide
quality services for community of users. The main objective of the UDL system is to develop and
implement a university digital libraries initiative system that would support and foster the
creation, maintenance and use poof digitized collections and resources of interest by the
university community. Technological approach for the development of the UDL system is based
on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).
Digital library are essentially online collection of heterogeneous information which are usually
maintained by some digital librarian. They are electronic extension of functions users typically
perform and the resources they access in a traditional library. These information resources can
translated into digital form, stored in multimedia repositories, and made available through webbased services. 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. The explosion of digital library research and practice was engineered by the
growth of the web as an interface and access route for information retrieval on a global basis.
Digital technology is making it easier to write books, easier to save their content, and in fact
easier to save everything being written. This will mean that more and more information is
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available. Libraries will find it easier and cheaper to store electronic information, as information
drifts from paper to electronic format. In 1950s, Computer entered library services in form of
punch card applications in technical services operation and through the development of machine
readable cataloguing (MARC) standard for digitizing and communicating library catalogue
information. With the development of the web and the move in the online industry to window
based, mouse-driven graphical user interface in the early 1990s led to term digital library as
universities and other institutions began to build discipline-based collection of information
resources in digital form, and provide access to these collections through local area and campus
wide networks. Since then many others groups have become involved in the expansion of digital
library technologies and techniques.
With the advent of the internet, individuals expectation for access to information have increase
dramatically. Patrons increase expect instant access to all the information resources they require
from any location, at any time and from any device. This is the objective digital library is
fulfilling, with digital library, an individual can gain access to the holdings of libraries worldwide
through automated catalogues; locate both physical and digitized versions of scholarly articles
and books; optimize searches, simultaneously search the internet, click through to access the
digitized content or locate addition items of interest. All these capabilities are available from
desktop or other web-enabled device such as a personal digital assistant or mobile phone. The
fundamental reason for building digital libraries is that they will provide better delivery of
information but still digital library culture poses some unique challenges for those on the way to
becoming successful digital library users. Some of the challenges include inability of user to be
able to search database effectively, Computer can cause feeling of isolation and dehumanization
and make their users feel harried and hurried, electronic content can be published by anyone with
access to a computer and internet so it often difficult to determine the identity and subject
expertise of another author.
At the moment there are many on-going digital library projects in different part of the
world. Digital libraries began with the digital library research initiatives in the US in 1994 and
the electronic libraries Programme (eLib) in UK in 1995. Nevertheless, digital library initiative
phases 1 and 2 projects and eLib phases 1, 2 and 3 have played a key role in digital library
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development. The focus of digital library initiatives is to dramatically advance the means to
collect, store and organize information in digital form and make it available for searching,
retrieval and processing through communication networks in a user-friendly manner. When
thinking about digital libraries, many question arise with the main one being how to convert
materials to digital form? The creation of digital information from conventional material is
generally a two stage process. The first stage is digitalization; this is the conversion of the
physical medium into a digital representation. The second stage of the computerization process is
to have the computer extract information from the digitized content. This stage allow some of the
information from the original page to be made available to the computer. Copyright is another
issue that has been called the simple most vexing barrier to digital library environment due to the
loss of control of copies. The UDL system will be a catalyst for change by creating
organizational and technical building blocks that allow the campus to conceive new ways of
creating, accessing and applying information resources to research and teaching.
The main objective of the UDL system is to develop and maintain an internet based
university digital libraries initiative system that would support and foster the creation, use and
maintenance of digitalized collection and resources of interest by the university community. The
main goal being put forward while designing the UDL system is its simple accessibility with
minimum requirement on the users side. UDL system is built on three-tier architecture which are
the database tier, the complex middle tier and the client tier.