Kekal Abadi 22 (2) 2003

ROLES AND FUNCTIONS OF INFORMATION PROFESSIONALSIN DIGITAL LIBRARIES

ByAdida Mohd Arnin", Lisdar Abdul Wahid2 and Rafidah Abdul Aziz"

Abstract: It is not an easy task to become an information professional. One must notonly have a strong educational background but also have a wide experience in the libraryprofession. Their roles, functions and contributions towards the success of a digitallibrary are discussed in this article.

Abstrak: Bukan mudah untuk menjadi seorang Profesional Maklumat. Beliau bukansahaja perlu mempunyai latar belakang pendidikan yang baik, malahan juga pengalamankerja yang luas terutamanya dalam bidang kepustakawanan. Peranan dan fungsi seorangProfesional Maklumat serta penyumbangan dalam kejayaan sebuah perpustakaan digitaldibincangkan dengan terperinci dalam artikel ini.

Introduction

A digital library is an organization that providesdigital information, specialized and professionalstaff, to select, structure and offer intellectualaccess of digital computing, storage, andcommunications machinery together with thecontent and software needed to reproduce,emulate, and extend the services provided byconventional libraries based on paper and othermaterial means of collecting, cataloguing, finding,and disseminating information. Services providedby a digital library must accomplish all essentialservices of traditional libraries and also exploitthe well-known advantages of digital storage,searching, and communication in which intendedto help users in finding specific information.

The fundamental reason for building digitallibraries is a belief that they will provide betterdelivery of information than was possible in thepast. Information once available only to theprofessional is now directly available to all. Froma personal computer, the user is able to consultmaterials that are stored on computers aroundthe world. According to Schatz (1997) "A digitallibrary enables users to interact effectively withinformation distributed across a network" .According to Arms (1995), A digital library canbe defined as a "distributed information systemensuring reliable storage and effective use ofheterogeneous col/ections of electronicdocuments (text, graphics, audio, video, etc.) viaglobal data transfer networks in a way convenientfor the end user".

The Importance of a Digital Library

As we move towards knowledge society era,it is very important to provide services that areidentified as a process of profound social change.Digital Library brings the library to the user's desk,either at home or at work as long as they have apersonal computer and network connection. Froma personal computer, the user is able to consultmaterials that are stored on computers aroundthe world. In developing a digital library, computerpower is very important especially in searchingand browsing purposes. This is becausecomputers systems are much better than manualmethods in finding information and particularlyuseful for reference work that involves repeatedleaps from one source of information to another.

Digital information on network makes itavailable to everybody at anytime without need totravel to the location where it is stored. AllInformation is easier to keep current and can beupdated continually. Therefore, many librariesmaintain online versions of directories,encyclopedias and other reference works. Thedoor of a digital library never closes andinformation is always available to everybody. Thetechnology of digital libraries is closely related tothe technology used in electronic mail andteleconferencing. A database may be the bestway to store census data so that it can beanalysed by the computer. Through this newtechnology, new forms of information becomeavailable to everybody and electronic storage isbecoming cheaper than paper and digital librarymay save money since less paper and spaceinvolved in data storage

I Librarian, Clients Services Division, University of Malaya Library2 Librarian, Law Library, University ofMaJaya Library) Librarian, Research and Academic Services Division, University of Malaya Library

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Characteristics of a Digital Library

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The Information Professional

a) UbiquityServices provided must be accessible at anytime from any physical location, although thelevel of service may vary by location.

b) TransparencyThe internal functioning of infrastructurecomponents and interactions must beinvisible to users. Users must be able toaccess services using their user interface ofchoice. Services must satisfy userrequirements rather than users satisfyingrequirements of the services.

c) Robustness and ScalabilityThe infrastructure must be powerful enoughto withstand a wide range of potential risksand continue to function without disruption tousers and service providers. These risksinclude environmental dangers such as floodsand intentional or accidental physical ortechnological attacks. The infrastructuremust also anticipate and support growth toinclude millions of service and informationproviders with billions of offerings.

d) Security and ConfidentialityThe infrastructure must include mechanisms,which ensure that parties to any transactioncan reliably be identified to each other, anygoods and services which are exchangedconform to expectations and standards, thatconfidentiality of the parties and thetransaction can be assured whereappropriate, and that the system cannot beeasily compromised.

e) Billing, Payment and ContractingThe infrastructure must support both financialtransactions in payment for goods andservices, and the delivery and utilization ofelectronically generated and managed tokens(e.g. digital payment). These transactionsmust be secure and low cost. In addition,the infrastructure must provide for rapid,secure, verifiable low cost electroniccontracting (e.g. agreements to transmit aparticular digital work at a specified price).

f) Searching and DiscoveryThe infrastructure must provide wide range ofresource identification strategies, from highlyspecific searches to general browsing. It thenmust support user's need and satisfies themin terms of services provided, speed ofaccess, cost and many more.

Traditionally, librarians have performed anumber of functions in the maintenance and theintellectual access to information. Thesetraditional roles will become even more importantin the maturation of the digital library. In the eraof Digital Library, the librarian is no longerassociated with library buildings, instead their newroles are more towards giving services to societysuch as: acquiring, organizing and preservingcollections of information. Now, with theestablishment of digital libraries, librarians will havethe opportunity to break away from the stereotypesof the past and define themselves in theinformation environments and services of thefuture. As we realize now, Internet has becomeSignificant in the information world. Librarian too,slowly has become a predominantly online worker,supporting the citizen/worker by selling services.Finding relevant information will be faster thanbefore, faster than a non-information-worker canfind it, and surviving on the basis of superiorknowledge of the networks and digital informationresources available through them. Working in anonline, network and digital environment, librarianscan now refer to themselves as informationprofessionals. Sreenivasulu (1998) also came upwith other nomenclatures to suit librarians' newroles such as digital librarian", "digital informationprofessional': "cybrarian" and "information broker".

Roles and Functions of InformationProfessionals (IP)

The Information Professional will also have toplay a multi-faceted role unlike the traditionallibrarian who concentrates on the core activitiesof the library such as acquiring, organizing andpreserving collections of information and providingservices

The Information Professional as Researcher

It has become necessary for the InformationProfessional to be involved in the R&D byfacilitating access to information, such asfinding, delivering and summarizing information.Librarians are highly skilled in the researchprocess and possess a unique knowledge ofthe breadth and depth of information resourcesin various subject specialties. It is believedthat librarians will increasingly become membersof research and development teams and playingmore role in the information creation process

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The Information Professional as Organizerand Publisher

The Information Professional has to playimportant roles such as organizers, reviewers andguardians of intellectual property in the digitallibraries of the future. Participation in theformation of new copyright law and application ofthe law in the digital library is critical. In the digitallibrary environment, the traditional roles ofpublishers as information packagers andinformation distribution facilitators and thetraditional role of libraries as storehouses ofinformation will be re-emphasized. As universities,regional research centers, laboratories,corporations and professional societies developtheir own depositories of information and makethem available to the world's networks, they takeover the publisher's and the library's traditionalroles. These entities, in this function, have thepotential of diminishing the role of traditionallibraries and commercial publishers if:

i. faculty tenure guidelines more solidly supportpublications through these entities inelectronic format returning intellectualownership of research output to their facultymembers

ii. university and scholarly presses becomeactivists in the electronic publishing revolution

iii. everything possible is done to support fairly-priced democratic access to information whilesupporting intellectual copyright; and mostimportantly

iv. information access and delivery systems aredesigned to meet the consumers' needs. Inthis case, digital library systems must bedependable, reasonably priced, must bepowerful, easy-to-use, intelligent searchengines, must have buying and must allowaccess from and delivery to the consumer'sworkstation.

Editors, faculties and librarians will haveimportant roles as organizers, reviewers andguardians of intellectual property in the digitallibraries of the future.

The Information Professional as a Memberof the Digital Library Design Team

The Information Professional must be involvedin the design and application of informationtechnology initiatives in collaboration withcomputer and information scientists to design,

organize, develop and maintain digital libraryrepositories, interfaces and networks. Librariansmust be active participants in this processbecause they are experts at accessing theworld's information resources today. Their areasof expertise are different than the computer andinformation scientists. The librarian's knowledgeof the world's information resources and theirknowledge and experience in directing users toinformation will be essential in the developmentand maintenance of the digital library's informationaccess and delivery systems. The librarians cancontribute to information selection, acquisition andorganization as well as the design of the searchengine and user interface.

The Information Professional as Teacher andConsultant .

The Information Professional must guide usersin information gathering, information skills andtools, organizing information resources, researchstrategies, basic reference works, accessinginformation and many more. Technology is farahead of information literacy education. Few usersof today's libraries are effective and efficient users,and no matter how advanced and sophisticatedinterfaces and search engines become in futureinformation access systems, people will still needto be educated regarding their use. Systems ofinformation production and distribution also needto be taught. They must understand how to defineand refine a research topic, how to analyze andinformation need, and how to critically interpretand evaluate information resulting from research.The librarian, therefore, has a critical role in thedigital library of the future as educator andconsultant (Mark England, 2000).

The Information Professional as a Guardianof Information Superhighway

The Information Professional has to ensurethat the information superhighway workingsmoothly and to avoid any disturbance to theservices. The information superhighway is a visionor a metaphor. It envisions a fusion of the two-way wired and wireless capabilities of telephonesand networked computers with a television cablecapacity to transmit hundreds of programs.Services would be delivered bytelecommunications networks, television cablenetworks and the Internet and mobilecommunications (William et.al., 1995).Infrastructure that provides bandwidth-on-demandand information-on-demand services is calledinformation superhighway. The digital librarianswill make sure that the information superhighway

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is working smoothly. Their task is to observe thesmoothness of the information superhighway, sothat it will not disturb the services provided bydigital libraries.

The Information Professional is alsoresponsible for the various functions involved inextracting, processing and disseminatinginformation. The functions include:

The Global Digital Library

The Information Professional is fullyresponsible for the digital library operations. Thedigital library is really a transitory phase towardsthe universal digital library, a vast distributedinformation and active repository accessible fromanywhere with increasing improved indexing,extraction and summarization techniques. Thedigital librarians will be fully responsible on thedigital library operations. They will give theirservices, support and help whenever the usersneed their assistance.

Symbiotic Human-Machine Guru

The Information Professional and computersdepend on each other for processing anddissemination of digital information and both areinter-related. A digital librarian acts as anintermediary in the task of massive digitization ofinformation, its storage, dissemination, managingthe archive and making available digitizednetworked information to the end users. Digitallibrarians and computers depend on each otherfor processing and disseminating digitalinformation and both are inter-related.

Knowledge and Data Mining

The digital librarian will require knowledge ofdata mining and discovery of knowledge from digitallibraries to extract unmet information needs forusers. For this purpose, unsupervised learningtechniques such as clustering and composite termdiscovery techniques, etc. are very useful.

Search and Retrieval Co-Ordination

The Information Professional can achieve thegoal of creating information queries by usingretrieval engines and indexing structures. Itrequires comprehensive knowledge of the retrievalengines and indexing structure so that the digitallibrarian can achieve the goal of creatinginformation queries with respect to the searchsystem.

Navigation, Browsing and Filtering Expert

The Information Professional is an expert innavigation, browsing and filtering, digital referenceservices and electronic information services fromthe digital information sources. The navigation ofthe future would tend to integrate with the human-assisted information retrieval from the networkeduniverse and would support rapid informationnavigation and precision retrieval

Digital Libraries Access Tools, Pools andSources of Information for the DigitalLibrarian:

These tools assist and facilitate in accessing,searching, browsing, navigating, retrieving,indexing, storing, organizing and disseminationof digitized information. The significant ones arelisted below:

a. Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs):meta-databases (describe, provide link toother databases/digital information sources)Online databases (examples: OCLC,MEDLlNE, EbscoHost, Infotrac, Proquest).

b. Internet-based tools such as: e-mail networks,mailing lists, electronic conferences, WorldWide Web, Website Home Page, Wide AreaInformation Services (WAIS), Web Browsers,Gopher Systems, and Veronica Archie, FTP,Telnet, Usenet, and Newsgroups.

c. Digital Networks/Networking such as:BLAISE, MEDLlNE, NICNET, DELNET,AGRIS, INIS and many more.

d. Hypertext/Hypermediae. Multimedia (high bandwidth computer

networks)f. Multimedia Networking Protocolsg. Cellular and Pager networksh. Electronic Publishing Toolsi. Net-Dwelling SoftwareAgentsj. Electronically Fax/Commercial Vendorsk. Telephone and Television

Educational Background for InformationProfessionals

For more than 25 years, Schools of InformationStudies all around the world have been adaptingtheir curricula and teaching activities to the newera of information technologies. According toDeschatelets (1997), the new digital informationsystem has created a major shift in the paradigmof the information transfer process. Digital Libraryeducation is still considered behind in sense offunding and practice. Currently, there is littlesystematic support for developing Digital Library

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(DL) courses and curricula, and no coordinatedeffort in library and information science (LIS) orcomputer science to provide DL education. Atpresent, nobody knows about good digital libraryeducation and what knowledge is required toproduce information or computer professionals towork as digital librarians, digital developers, or inother job categories, or even what the jobdesignations or requirements will be in the future.Computer scientists may be responsible for thetechnical development of digital libraries, withinformation scientists focusing on the content,organization, users, and retrieval of information.Most of the development of information retrievalhas been done by computer scientists, (such asSalton at Cornell, van Rijsbergen at Glasgow, andCroft at the University of Massachusetts were allin computer science departments) (AmandaSpink, 1999). The current shortage of librariansand information professionals with the expertiseto fulfill the current technological demands oflibraries will be exacerbated by the future demandfor digital librarians.

The emerging demand for digital librarians anddigital libraries may initiate and contribute to therestructuring of the library and information science,and the computer science curricula. Thedevelopment of "digital libraries" track forinformation and computer science students thatfocuses on the technical and human aspects ofthe web and digital libraries seems inevitable. Inthe United States, several universities havereorganized existing library schools to emphasizedigital information and online services. Two notableexamples are at Berkeley and Michigan. TheTICER summer school at Tilburg University in theNetherlands and several of OCLC's programs aimto update the skills of experienced librarians. Inaddition, there are numerous specialized courses,ranging from creating web sites for computerscientists to seminars on intellectual property forlawyers. Nevertheless, the number of courses thatare specifically on digital libraries is surprisinglysmall.

Competencies and Skills of an InformationProfessional in the Management of Digitallibraries

The competency of a digital librarian isrepresented by different sets of skills, attitudesand values that enable a digital librarian to workas digital information professional or digitalknowledge worker and digital knowledgecommunicator ( Sreenivasulu, 1998).

The following are the skills and competencies

required for a digital librarian in new paramanagement of digital information systems anddigital libraries.

Information Technology Skills:

Digital Librarians must be competent in areassuch as:

Multimedia indexing, image processing andobject-oriented processing;Interactive digital communications andvisualization;Cataloguing and classification of digitaldocuments and digital content;Searching and retrieval of text, images andother multimedia objects;Speech recognition and image visualization;Advanced processing capabilities exploitingdigital medium;Conferencing techniques includingteleconferencing and video conferencing.(Sreenivasulu, 1998)

Digital Librarians also must be capable andknowledgeable in the following fields:

Interfacing online and off-ramps, twists andturns of digital knowledge;Development of digital information sources;Digitization of print collections;Competency to manage CD-ROM networkstations; lrnJDevelopment of online catalogue records;Design and development of databases;Design and development of software agentsfor digital libraries;Conversion of print media into digital media;

Information Retrieval Skills:

Must be somebody who is an expert innavigation, browsing and filtering information;Must know the procedure of retrieving,accessing and digital document analysis;Must know how to operate the digital referenceservices and electronic information services;Must be able to search network databasesin a number of digital sources and Web Sites;Must be able and know how to create homepage, content conversion and downloadingtechniques;Must have web authoring and wide knowledgeon web publishing as we" as electronicpublishing.Must be somebody who is expert in archivingdigital documents and locating digitalsources;

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Must have knowledge on digital preservationand storage;Must be able to operate electronic messagingand must have connectivity skills to accessinformation;

7.0 Conclusion

The emerging digital library has reshaped thecore skills needed by information professionals.No longer solely managers of paper publications,librarians now administer computers, phone lines,and video and audio resources as well as humanresources. They remain the guardians and

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