Prof. Inder Vir MalhanHead, DLIS & Dean SoMC&ISCentral University of Himachal PradeshDharmshala

The sprawling internet and advances in web technologies have set the pace for publication of information in digital form and accelerated the process of digitization of documents.

Advances in networking technologies, promises of cloud computing for offering vast remote storage, the elimination of need for physical storage, are facilitating the growing acceptance of digital documents as media for recording and transmission of information.

The better appeal of digital documents, hyper links to other documents, quick retrieval and fast transmission of such documents, is leading to growth of digital documents.

The technological feasibility of simultaneously searching several digital repositories together through federated search processes, optimization of search processes, is further giving impetus to digital revolution.

Integration of text, voice, videos, pictures and sizing the digital content as per requirement is helping to create knowledge resources that is making the process of learning interesting, amusing and engaging.

Digital technologies help us to create better documents from deteriorating and paling pages of manuscripts and classic books and from fading files, pictures and painting.

The process of digitization is helping us to make more information available to more people and provide most democratic access to information.

The digital information environment helped to truly realize the goal of universal availability of publications and just in time access to information.

The digital information environment also opened up opportunities for open access movement.

It may be millions of Library of Congress’s digitized documents, or Alexandria digital library, collections are accessible globally for free.

All kind of collection e.g. Texas university’s digital maps collection, Picture Australia, New York Public Library’s Pictures Database are in open access for global information users.

Digital information environment also offers collections for specific level of users e.g. International children digital library.

The process of digitization mirrored the best practices in various cultures, helped in diffusion of cultures and brought to light some of the hidden treasures of knowledge.

Digitization is also helping us to preserve our rich cultural heritage and capture and preserve the indigenous knowledge practices.

Digital collections available over networks enhanced accessibility of information, improved cross disciplinary communication of information and overcome the barriers of time and space.

Authors are writing and instantly making available their content chapter by chapter and even paragraph by paragraph.

The book is unbundled and journals are uncovered, ideas are now being increasingly boxed in blogs that may be updated hour by hour and even in less than this time.

Content is also increasingly moving to personal space and several new documentary forms such as personal websites, podcasts, webinars, tweets, and YouTube videos are being used to communicate information and ideas which is leading to growing pithiness of content.

Along with pithiness of digital content, we are witnessing another trend of integration of content to develop massive information resources through wiki approach.

Scientists are sending and maintaining their research outputs collectively at designated servers e.g. BioMedCentrum.

Individuals are getting connected through social computing networks according to their interests and sharing their ideas and information.

It is ultimately the humans that create and derive meaning out of digital content and provide context to it.

Human networking is therefore getting as important as technological networking.

Social networking has huge potential for putting people together irrespective of their geographical locations and collaboratively create digital content.

With Face book alone reaching one billions users, if appropriately tapped, it is great channel for cognitive coherence and harmonizing human expertise to leverage advantage from the knowledge of each other.

Social networking is not only means for instant communication but also for formal discussion and sharing of ideas.

The social computing therefore has enormous potential to create more digital knowledge resources by rapid conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge resources.

Great fragmentation of content because of growing quest for identity and integration according to shared values and common interests is taking place.

The growing trend of publication of explicit knowledge in digital forms along with digitization of manuscripts, print collections and other forms of human expression, have created an ocean of digital information.

The convenience of accessibility of digital information through smart phones, and other hand held devices, is likely to further push the use and generation of more digital information resources.

The increasing storage memory of such hand held devices and improvements in software is facilitating storage of more digital content in such devices e.g. wiki mobile can store two million articles of the Wikipedia on a mobile phone.

We are heading towards and ocean of digital information and sky is the limit for digital information based services.

Digital information is growing exponentially, whereas the time available with information users is limited.

As there is no dearth of digital information resources, more challenging situation now is how to find high quality need based most appropriate information, personalize this information to serve individual needs and align this information with work process for better work performance.

The challenge is how to evaluate and quality filter the huge volume of digital information resources and how to find time and invest efforts to link information with information to create knowledge mashups.

Another challenge is to develop strategic knowledge resources from such knowledge mashups that may help to initiate appropriate action and ensure productive use of time to achieve competitive advantage in performance.

Evaluation and quality filtering of digital information resources is not an easy task.

It requires coordination among professionals having common interests and convergence of efforts for more effective action.

Unbundling and pithiness of digital information are posing new challenges of organization of such information resources.

There are great times ahead for information aggregators e.g. Moreover is aggregating blogs.

There is also enormous service potential for packing and repacking the malleable digital content.

How to organize digital content in standardized formats for quick retrieval is a great concern?

Pinpointed information search is becoming a great challenge in searching digital resources through search engines.

Along with some relevant documents, search engines bring on the screen a lot of irrelevant and useless information.

This information clutter saps our energies in the process of information search and take away our time.

Another challenge for organization and preservation of digital information resources particularly the hypermedia information resources is the persistence of such resources.

To-day our capacity to record information has increased exponentially over time while the longevity of the media to store information has decreased equivalently (Conway).

The digital information resources are often updated, revised and replaced by authors with more value addition.

Hence they may become outdated after some period of time. Some are even created for their utility during a specific period of time.

The preservation and use of digital information resources are dependent on machines and software tools which themselves change with the passage of time.

Migration of such resources from present to the next level of technologies is a great challenge.

Moreover, improving information architecture, adding adequate and appropriate users friendly interfaces as the technologies advance and mature, is a continuing preservation problem.

In the current conundrum and chaotic digital information landscape some efforts are being made to organize digital information resources through various approaches.

Virtual libraries, subject gateways and portals are being created to provide access to need based content.

Knowledge management tools such as spicynodes are emerging to improve access to digital knowledge resources.

A number of software packages such as Greenstone, Dspace are existing to develop digital libraries and institutional repositories of digital documents.

A number of content management software packages such as Drupal, Joomla are available in open source to manage digital content.

Information professionals have tried organization of digital documents using library classification schemes and subject heading lists e.g. Bubl Link, Link Larder, Scotland Cultural Service.

An advantage of using classification schemes is that they are already universally accepted ways and standardized practices for organizing knowledge resources and they ensure better precision in the process of information search.

A considerable effort for archiving and retrieval of digital documents is also focussed on metadata or descriptive information about records that require to be preserved e.g. Dublin core metadata standards.

Development of Resource Description Framework (RDF) and now a powerful OWL Web Ontology Language have potential applications for digital document organization and searching.

One of the most promising and flexible way of describing digital objects is the application of XML.

It offers the possibilities of information resource description including elements such as structure, content and context.

On the web specific side, trends such as Asynchrous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) allow dynamic access to any XML based data source out of standard web applications.

They even allow the dynamic refreshing of content in response to user interactions, which breaks the traditional limitation of static web pages only being reloaded on refresh or link traversals (Erik wilde)

Users participation in particularly hypermedia organization and searching is growing because of emergence of collaborative tagging.

Users themselves assign keywords to web-based information resources. However, the keywords representing the information resources in such a system purely depends upon how do users look at the content and are not from standardized controlled vocabularies e.g. Del.icio.us offers such service.

Users’ approach in such digital knowledge resource organization is generally very casual and largely depends upon the users level and understanding of the content and hence sometimes some of the tags assigned may not exactly represent the subject area of the content.

Tools are also emerging that have mechanisms to collect digital information from a wide range of sources and organize this information for users’ convenience and thus are improving accessibility to information e.g. Imacros, Headline Grabbers, Ficstar, etc.

Databases and repositories are providing mobile interfaces to bring digital information resources in the hands of individuals e.g. world cat, Medline database.

Copyright issues are the major hurdles in the digitization projects.

Even Google while digitizing Google Books faced law suits from the American Publishers Association and Authors Guide.

The HaathiTrust distributed digital repository of the California University and sixty other research libraries was also sued by Author’s Guide. Last month only the federal court decided against Author’s Guide and declared that the use of Haathi Trust repository is a fair use under the U.S. laws

The widening digital divide and the growing need for digital information literacy are the other two major issues in improving accessibility to digital information resources.

If we are really concerned to utilize the full potentialities of our people, we must gear up to bridge the digital divide, constantly counter their technological impairment and initiate programs to impart information literacy for facilitating adequate and effective use of digital information resources.

Thanking you