Week 10: Digital Library, Institutional Repositories

Because the introduction of digitization, as well as wider use of the Internet, changed the way sources of information can be formatted and organized, it was only a matter of time that libraries, a haven for sources of information, had to adapt to these technological breakthroughs. However, in order for the incorporation to work, the current staff within the libraries simply could not implement the tasks alone, especially with their increasingly out-dated methods. The situation called upon computer scientists and their field of knowledge to collaborate with the librarians. As a result of the cooperation, the transition became a success, which in turn established and made use of the digital library. As the digital library became well-recognized along with the increasing popularity of the Internet, more libraries had to keep up with the times by adapting to these technologies. By maintaining a collection of sources in their digital format and making use of the Internet as a means to keep them available, libraries were able to continue satisfying the needs of the general public, who are readily engaging in different methods to obtain information. Yet the libraries alone should not be burdened with the task of making digital/digitized sources available to the general public. The universities also contain a treasury for sources of information within their archives. Because the academic system also needs to keep up with the times as much as the public library system, it would seem logical that those institutions also make use of digitization and the Internet. Through the use of their institutional repositories, the items being kept within can be digitized and published over the World Wide Web. As more institutions devoted to collecting, organizing, and maintaining sources of information obtain and incorporate digitization and the Internet (as well as the other latest technological breakthroughs and trends), so long as the people remain engaged with their gadgets, information can become more and more available and much easier to access for the general public.

As noted by Christine L. Borgman in her book “Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet,” the notion of a “digital library” had been dismissed at first. According to the skeptics, the concepts of the library and digitization were incompatible, i.e. “if a library is a library, it is not digital; if a library is digital, it is not a library.” As the times were passing by, science has once again proved the skeptics wrong. Modern-day technology has clearly demonstrated that the format of the library did not have to remain in the confines of what has traditionally been defined as such. As long as an entity is taking on the responsibility of collecting, organizing, and maintaining different sources of information (conventionally from various fields), it can still be considered by a technicality as a library, whether it is in a physical or digital format. The flexibility of this concept should also apply to the archival and academic communities, on account that the items consisting of their collections can also exist in their physical and digital formats. Because universities often maintain libraries and archives within their institutions, through the incorporation of digitization and the Internet, the circumstances render them as the most benevolent of contributors to the general public. However, their generosity does not have to stop there, or at least not within those specific areas. Since universities also preserve the researches of the scholars who had contributed to their institutions, the utilization of the technologies also enables them to quickly publish their works and make the materials readily available via the Internet; thus allowing even more sources of information to become accessible to the general public.