LESSON 12:

Challenges Faced
on Digital
 LESSON 11: CHALLENGES OF DEVELOPING AND MANAGING DIGITAL LIBRARIES

•11.1 Introduction
•For digital libraries, advantages outweigh disadvantages but still there a number of challenges
that one faces in developing and managing them. The purpose of this lesson is to enable you
understand the challenges of developing and managing digital libraries.

•11.2 Lesson Learning Outcomes

•By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
•11.2.1 Explain the technical challenges experienced in developing and managing digital
libraries.
•11.2.2 Explain the access challenges experienced in developing and managing digital libraries.
•11.2.2 Explain the management challenges experienced in developing and managing digital
libraries.
 Challenges Faced on Digital Preservation

• In every work there must be some challenges.

• In the field of digital preservation there are also many challenges
explored over many years and over the last few decades.
• Few challenges are summarized below:
1) Obsolescence in the terms of technology
2) Continuous migration
3) Lack of legislation, policy, strategy and awareness
4) Lack in the sense of collaboration and partnership
5) Deterioration of the digital media
6) Disaster planning and recovery
 Challenges Faced on Digital Preservation

Digital collection content is at risk from the moment it's

created.
• Preserving digital material is not simply a technical
challenge. It demands an ongoing series of actions and
interventions throughout the lifecycle. This ensures
continued and reliable access to authentic digital objects
for as long as they are of value.
• Digital collection content is at risk from the moment it's
created. Our proactive strategy responds to these risks to
deliver effective and efficient solutions.
 Challenges Faced on Digital Preservation
Technological obsolescence
• As technology changes, it is more difficult to reliably access content made on
or for older computing platforms. Technological obsolescence is often
regarded as the greatest threat to digital material, but this is just the long-
term view.
• In the shorter term we need to think of everything from media integrity and
bit rot to digital rights management and metadata. Other notable differences
between analogue and digital content further add to the challenge.
Proactive lifecycle management
• Ongoing technological advances and the fragility of digital content require
preservation actions to be taken much earlier in the lifecycle than for
traditional collections, and at a much greater frequency. A lifecycle
management approach is needed to ensure appropriate actions are taken in
good time.
 Challenges Faced on Digital Preservation

Integrity and validation

• It's easier to make unnoticed changes to digital content than to
traditional objects. These changes may affect the authenticity and
integrity of the content. Malicious change must be prevented and
appropriate change managed.
Fragility of storage media
• The integrity of storage media for digital materials diminishes at a more
rapid pace than analogue archival storage. Resulting bit rot can prevent
files from rendering correctly if at all. This can happen with no notice
and within just a few years or less of the media being produced. The
rapid rate at which technology is evolving and the relative transience of
digital content make this a real challenge.
 Challenges Faced on Digital Preservation

New formats
• The preservation of new forms of digital publication needs to be
considered (such as interactive narratives and mobile eBook apps).
This is a developing field and necessitates consideration of the
requirements needed to ensure preservation and access.
Scale
• The Library deals with a huge amount of content, there being over
1 petabyte of digital content including the UK Web Archive, the
National Digital Sound Collection and our digitised newspaper
legacy. The work of the team ensures all this content will be
available for the long term regardless of its form or format.
 Challenges Faced on Digital Preservation

• i) Obsolescence in the terms of technology: Due the rapid change in the hardware and software
format, this may cause the loss of the access to the digital preservation. Which make the digital
preservation meaningless.
• ii) Continuous migration: it arises from the challenge of rapid technological obsolesces therefore
continuous migration needed.
• iii) Lack of legislation, policy, strategy and awareness: it is one of the major challenges of digital
preservation of materials. Legislators may not be aware with the requirements of digital preservation, as
a result legislation either ignore or imperfectly cover preservation issues. This further makes additional
challenges in terms of copyright.
• The UNESCO draft on the digital preservation clearly emphasized to raise awareness and advocacy in
favour of digital preservation.
• iv) Lack in the sense of collaboration and partnership: there is a lack of clearly assigned
responsibilities and collaboration for the long-term preservation of digital materials.
• v) Deterioration of the Digital Media: it is one of the major challenges of the digital preservation. This
is the cause for the disappearance or inaccessibility of the digital material.
• vi) Disaster Planning and Recovery: due to the absence of disaster planning and mitigation measures,
it affects to the digital material which results in unnecessary and permanent loss of valuable digital
resources.
 Advantages & Disadvantages

Advantages on digitalization preservation in library as

follows:
1) It makes possible for future generation to use the data
2) It ensures an unbroken chain of evidence in research data
3) It helps to reuse the library materials
4) It is a long-term view
5) It helps in legal obligations of record retention
6) It helps to improve the possibilities for developing
competence and reduces the human factor.
 • What are the disadvantages of digital library?
• Some of the disadvantages on digitalization preservation are given below:
1) Digitization violates the copyright law as the thought content of one author
can be freely transferred by others without his acknowledgement.
2) High initial cost.
3) Digital library needs high bandwidth network for transfer of multimedia
resources.
4) Copyright regime.
5) Speed of the accessible information is very high.
6) Cost of the library digitization is very high.
7) Digital libraries will require high bandwidth for transfer of multimedia
resources, but the band is decreasing day by day.
8) Digital libraries cannot provide a traditional environment because people
would like to read printed materials.
 What are the issues and challenges encountered in in the digital libraries?
• There are some disadvantages of digital libraries, which are as follows:
User authentication for access to collections
• Digital preservation
• Equity of access
• Interface design
• Interoperability between systems and software
• Information organization
• Training and development.
 10.2.3 Importance of digital preservation in libraries

•Digital preservation is very much essential in academics libraries because it is

impossible to keep all documents or recorded materials in their original format so
in order to store those materials should convert to the electronic format.
•The greater the importance of digital materials, the greater the need for their
preservation: digital preservation protects investment, captures potential and
transmits opportunities to future generations and our own.
• Digital preservation helps us to store and keep our information resources safe
and secure for future purpose.
• In the academic library, digital preservation plays important roles which make
secure and give longevity to the information resources.
 Digital library challenges

• Creating “effective” digital libraries pose serious challenges for

existing and future technologies.
• The integration of digital media into traditional collections will not
be straightforward, like previous new media (e.g., video audio
tapes), because of the unique nature of digital information, which is
less fixed, easily copied, and remotely accessible by multiple users
simultaneously.
• Some specific challenges are resource discovery, digital collection
development, digital library administration, copyright and licensing,
etc., library of congress specified various challenges for building an
effective digital library, which are grouped as broad categories as
follows.
 Digital library challenges

• Building the resource

• a. Develop improved technology for digitizing analog materials
• b. Design search and retrieval tools that compensate for abbreviated or
incomplete cataloging or descriptive information
• c. Design tools that facilitate the enhancement of cataloging or descriptive
information by incorporating the contributions of users.
• Interoperability
• a. Establish protocols and standards to facilitate the assembly of distributed
digital libraries.
• Intellectual property
• a. Address legal concerns associated with access, copying, and dissemination
of physical and digital materials.
 Digital library challenges

• Effective access
• a. Integrate access to both digital and physical materials
• b. Develop approaches that can present heterogeneous
resources in a coherent way
• c. Make the national digital library useful to different
communities of users and for different purposes
• b. Provide more effective and flexible tools for transforming
digital content to suit the need of end users.
• Sustaining the resource
• a. Develop economic models for the support of the national
digital library.
 1. Technical challenges experienced in developing and managing digital libraries.

•To accommodate digital materials, libraries must upgrade their

digital library technical architectures.
•These are the architecture which are comprised of such
components as
1)high-speed local networks,
2)fast connections to the internet,
3)relational databases and
4)full text search engines that provide access to resources.
 1. Technical challenges experienced in developing and managing digital libraries.

•In addition, diverse servers are required including web and FTP (protocols) servers.
•Hence, the architecture for digital libraries is a complex one which is costly to
maintain and is comprised of a collection of separate systems and resources.
•These are connected through a network and integrated through one interface (web
interface). This sort of architecture is expensive.
•Digital libraries also require the use of common standards that allow them to achieve
interoperability and therefore ensure they are in a position to share resources.
•However, the difficulty facing digital libraries is that there is the existence of a wide
range of data structures, controlled vocabularies document formats, search engines, and
interfaces.
•11.2.2 Access challenges experienced in developing and managing digital libraries.
•Metadata
•Metadata is important in digital libraries. It is key especially because it facilitates
resource discovery and use of digital documents.
•Metadata is a central issue to the development of digital libraries and the creation
of metadata records is very time-consuming due to the scanning of works which
involve image processing and quality assurance processes. The creation of such
records also requires trained personnel.
•That has resulted in the introduction of simpler metadata schemes. In addition to
existence of complex metadata schemes, many metadata schemes exist and the
most famous one is the Dublin core metadata scheme.
•The availability of many metadata schemes and adoption of wide range of these
schemes by libraries is a barrier to information access and use in a digital library.
2. Naming, Identifiers and Persistence
•In digital libraries, names do uniquely identify digital objects and they
are part of a documents metadata. In a digital library, names are
significant, and their significance can be compared to that of an
International Standard Book Number (ISBN) in a traditional library.
•The names give unique identification to digital objects. That makes it
possible for digital document retrieval, citations and management of
copyright.
•Digital libraries therefore need a scheme of unique identifiers which are
not tied to specific locations or processes, and which remain varied even
when a document is moved from one location to another or migrated
from one storage medium to another.
challenges experienced in developing and managing digital
libraries.
Cost of Management Building Digital Collections
1)Creation of digital libraries is costly, and cost is a major issue
standing in the way of their development. This is because
digitization of existing materials and the acquisition of original
digital works require long-term access and preservation.
2)Digitization, one of the primary methods of digital collection
building, and preservation are very expensive processes.
challenges experienced in developing and managing digital libraries.
Copyright / Right Management
1)This is a great barrier to digital library development. Digital objects are remotely
accessible to multiple users simultaneously but also easily copied.
2)Unlike publishers who own their information, libraries are caretakers of information
and they do not have possession of copyright of the material they hold.
•Preservation
1)Keeping digital information available in perpetuity is another major issue. In
addition, every time data is migrated from one format to another, information is
either distorted or lost.
2) Information organization.-too much information available yet most not organized
systematically
3) Training and development-users as well as staff require the right skills to be able to
use these digital collections.
 Conclusion

• Modern day academic library should focus more and more on digital
preservation so that users take most benefits from it. Digital preservation is
very much essential in academics libraries because it is impossible to keep
all documents or recorded materials in their original format so in order to
store those materials should convert to the electronic format. The need
• for digitization has been fundamental to ensure the durability, usability,
intellectual integrity
• of the data / information contained in the materials to be preserved for the
current and future
• generations.
 • References
• 1. Akter, Tahmina.(2013). Digital Preservation of Library Materials.International
Research: Journal of Library & Information Science 3(1), 20-30.Retrieved from
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• 2. Deshpande, Jayant.(2016).Digital preservation in library.International Journal of Library &
Information Science (IJLIS), 5(2), 25–29.Retrieved from
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IJLIS_05_02_004.pdf
• 3. Iyishu, Victoria A., Nkanu, William O. & Ogar, Frederick O.(2013).Preservation and conservation of
library materials in the digital age. Journal of Information and Knowledge
Management,4(2),36-46.Retrieved from https://www.ajol.info/index.php/iijikm/article/view/144621
• 4. Jharotia, Anil Kumar.(2018). Importance Of Digital Preservation In Digital Era. Retrieved Jul 21, 2018
from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326534604_IMPORTANCE_OF_DIGITAL
_PRESERVATION_IN_DIGITAL_ERA
• 5. Lakshminarasimhappa, M. C. & Veena, M. R.(2014).Digital preservation in libraries why and
how.International Journal of Digital Library Services,4(4),90 -97.Retrieved from
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• 6. Pal, Surendra Kumar, Digital preservation methods and technology in digital era. Retrieved from
https://www.academia.edu/13486465/Digital_Preservation_Methods_and_Technology_In_Digital_Era