Digital Libraries Essay Example

Over the last decades, thanks to the digitization of information, alternatives have emerged to replace traditional libraries. Proposals from digital libraries, e-books and search engines have started to gain popularity among students and researchers. The experts who advocate for this trend consider digital libraries will be a new reality, making traditional libraries obsolete. Even though there is a tendency to implement digital resources in the educational area, some studies show that contrary to what was thought, the use of electronic resources has not consolidated a change due to the different needs and requirements of users. Therefore, this article will focus on collecting various sources of information that demonstrate that conventional libraries are not replaceable.

Proposals for digital accessibility in the educational field try to benefit users. The Google Books proposal seeks to digitize the vast majority of existing books, with the permission and copyright to offer it to the public (Cohen, 2009). Currently, no other technology company has tried to push this proposition, and since there is a wealth of information and no one has tried to do so, Google is doing so. The Google Book Search project would lead the OPAC and other search engines to improve their access to information and provide benefits to academics and users in general. Even the proposal of search engines such as OPAC proposes to offer simplistic search alternatives, providing benefits to the educational process since the behavior of academics in the search for information is changing thanks to the web environment (Kumar, 2012). Currently, the use of the web to meet some academic needs is very necessary among students. However, these proposals do not always end up being what the user expects.

There are many problems when talking about the Google Book Project. First of all, this project is nothing new since other projects with similar objectives have existed long before Google as a company, and now that Google's popularity has grown, it greatly benefits the implementation of this project. On the other hand, the idea that the Google Books Project seeks to offer academic help in the face of commercial matters is highly debated. This debate is based on the idea that Google is trying to monopolize the digital area of information having control over the vast majority of books with copyright in the United States that include those works considered orphan works. The fact that those works that do not have owners should not generate profits either to the Registry or to Google, after all, they do not have the right to keep unearned and undeserved income from these orphan works (Lliburn, 2010). Therefore, a critical look at the Google Books Project aims to show that the educational objective of this project is very far from its reality. As well as raising the idea that Google plans to monopolize digital resources instead of presenting them as an academic resource. Additionally, according to some studies, the Google Books project has been errors such as misclassification, scan quality, OCR processing, and wrong dates on the books. As Google Search Books is such an ambitious project, the uncertainty as to whether these errors will be resolved in the future is doubtful.

Despite the offer of tools and possibilities for digital book proposals, the user has different preferences and perspectives on the use of digital resources. Currently, in many university libraries, there is a great variety of collections combined between printed and electronic books, in less developed countries, the situation is somewhat different since most of their universities still acquire printed information resources (Kumar, 2012). On the other hand, some studies show that even if students prefer electronic books as they provide a better reading comprehension, the results also show the counterpart of this reality (Hoseth, McLure, 2014). Studies conducted by Southwest Baptist University and SpringerVerlag indicated that, in general, there is a strong preference from the users for using print books over e-books as some of them present eye strain, difficulty accessing digital books, and disagreement. The dissatisfaction of users is due to the lack of flexible accessibility to electronic resources (Hoseth & Mclure, 2012). In addition to mentioning that errors in the quality of the scanning and processing of books motivate students to prefer conventional alternatives. However, the idea is visionary, and there are ways to innovate and implement digital services in this area.

Digital resources do not satisfy the users' needs due to their different perspectives and demands regarding traditional material. The reality of what the user is looking for is highlighted in the studies carried out. Each one has a different perception of what is advantageous when preferring a digital book or a traditional one. Although access to information is currently a top priority due to the current importance of the teaching process (Kumar, 2012), digital resources are not always the answer to how you should educate yourself. Traditional libraries have been around longer than any technology company (Dougherty, 2009) and have remained for decades as the best sources of information for any academic work. Additionally, The Google books project raises the idea of ​​providing better information access, as not all of us are welcome to a library at Harvard or Oxford. However, even if there is unrestricted access to these millions of books, there will be a need to subscribe. Therefore, it would be relevant to look for the opportunity of improving digital library services to raise the popularity of e-resources among academics (Zanghi-LaPlaca, 2012) since the participation in digital management systems will seek to transmit an interactive value of the complement between the physical and online services. Moreover, to recognize that the presence of traditional libraries in the virtual area will significantly support teaching and instruction for the benefit of academic users.