Nice Nhet

 Digital media refers to electronic media that works on digital code. It is also defined as the creative convergence of digital arts, science, communication, social interaction, education, technology and business for human expression. Examples of digital media are cellphones, compact disc, digital video, digital television, internet, World Wide Web, video games etc.

Through the WWW, various and overflowing information emerged in different forms like audio, video, 3D presentation, animations etc. Access of information becomes more interesting and creative for the researchers. With the information explosion, most libraries started to equip their services and think of ways to meet the present demand. The Digital media opened the door for the digitization in the library.

A good example was a project called National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Library of Congress for the collection and preservation of digital information. To lead this effort, the congress passed the Public Law 106-554 which is a special legislation appropriating $100 million to the Library of Congress with the goal of developing a national strategy to collect, archive and preserve the growing amounts of digital content, especially materials that are created only in digital formats.

With the help of their partners from different organizations, they have come up with the following goals:

1. Identify and collect at-risk born-digital content.

2. Build and support national network of partners working together to preserve digital content.

3. Develop and use technical tools and services for preservation.

4. Encourage public policy to support digital preservation.

5. Show why digital preservation is important for everyone.

Apropos to this technology, the need for digital media management system arises and becomes very useful for big organizations handling large chunk of digital data. Since media needs to be stored, indexed and managed having good digital media management software will help in archiving, retrieving, tracking and manipulating the digital data. It is a matter of choosing appropriate software that fits your requirement.

Having a digital library is having a network of multimedia system giving the clienteles fingertip access. The following are the ADVANTAGES of the Digital Library:

1. NO PHYSICAL BOUNDARY- users need not to go the library physically.

2. ROUND THE CLOCK AVAILABILITY- can be accessed at any time.

3. MULTIPLE ACCESSES- same resources can be used at the same time by a number of users.

4. STRUCTURED APPROACH- provides access to much richer content in a more structured manner.

5. INFORMATION RETRIEVAL- able to search term, word or phrase of the entire collection.

6. PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION- exact copy of the original can be made any number of times without any degradation in quality.

7. SPACE- has the potential to store much more information and requires very little physical space.

8. NETWORKING- provides the link to any other resources.

9. COST- maintaining a digital library is much lower than traditional library.

Putting up a digital library is not always favorable and rewarding. Aside from the computer viruses, lack of standardization for digitized information, health hazard nature of the radiation from the monitor etc. here are some DISADVANTAGES:

1. COPYRIGHT- digitization violates the copyright law since the content can be freely transferred without the knowledge of the author. The challenge is to how a digital library distributes information while protecting the copyright of the author.

2. SPEED OF ACCESS- the speed of access decreases as more and more computer gets connected to the internet.

3. INITIAL COST IS HIGH- the infrastructure cost like hardware, software, leasing communication circuit is relatively high.

4. BAND WIDTH- there is a need for a high band for transfer of multimedia resources but the band width is decreasing due to its over utilization.

5. EFFICIENCY- finding the right material becomes difficult due to large volume of digital information.

6. ENVIRONMENT- many people find reading printed material easier than reading on the computer screen.

7. PRESERVATION- due to technological developments, digital library can rapidly become out-of-date.

With the aforementioned positive and negative aspects of digital media in the library, I have reflected that we should take the challenge and be open to this technology. Like in business, we should meet the present demands of our customers to be effective. They are the blood and the reason for our existence. Digital media makes the searching easier and more accessible to the researchers that leads to customer satisfaction. It brings us closer to the world and it widens everybody’s horizon in researching in just a few clicks. It is really a great technology to maintain.

Through this, the role of the librarian becomes more challenging in terms of packaging and repackaging of information, for electronic publishing, for reference purpose etc.

At Marikina City Library, we have Computer Section where users may avail 30 minutes of Internet searching for free. This section is strictly for “online researching” only and is really in demand and always occupied. Sites like friendster, youtube, etc. are not allowed to be opened here. Aside from the fact that they may enjoy it for free, users find online researching fast and easy rather than going to the card catalog, get the call number, go to the selves, scan and browse the content etc. Yes, we also encounter problems like viruses invading the computer unit, overloading of some AVR, malfunctioning hardware etc. but we have Management Information System (MIS) department to maintain and troubleshoot these problems.

We are also working out on purchasing ten more computers to meet the growing demand for Internet searching and have prepared for making the library a Wi-Fi zone so that researchers may bring their laptop and do the searching in their respective tables.

On the other hand, traditional library should be maintained because other clienteles prefer printed materials right before their eyes or they are not versed or comfortable with digital media. We should make sure that we meet their needs as well. In addition, printed materials are also useful especially when there is no internet connection or when it is brownout.

For me, the library should pursue digitization and have this technology but NOT totally to replace the traditional library.

References: http://digitalpreservation.gov/library, http://liswiki.org/wiki/Digital_library