अकबर के कार्य / WORKS OF AKBUR

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

अकबर के कार्य

1. दास प्रथा का अंत - 1562 ई 
2. अकबर कि हरम दल से मुक्ति -1562  ई। 
3. तीर्थ यात्रा कर कि समाप्ति   - 1563 ई 
4. जजिया कर कि समाप्ति   - 1564 ई  
5. फतेहपुर सीकरी  कि स्थापना -- 1571 ई  . 
6. इबादत खाने कि स्थापना  -- 1575 ई  . 
7. मज़हर कि घोषणा -    ---    1579 ई   . 
8. दीन -इ - इलाही  कि स्थापना  --- -1582 ई  
9. इलाही संवत का प्रारम्भ होना -- 1583 ई 
10. राजधानी को लाहौर में रखा -- 1585 ई  . 

• आगरा कि राजधानी रखी - फतेहपुर सिकरी  

विजयनगर आने वाले विदेशी यात्री

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

विजयनगर आने वाले विदेशी यात्री

1. निकोलकांटी -- इटली --1420 ई  .--- देवराय  प्रथम 
2. अब्दुर्रज्जाक --फारस --1442 ई  . --देवराय द्वितीय 
3. नूनीज़ --  --    पुर्तगाल --  1450 ई   . ----मल्लिकार्जुन 
4. डोमिंगपायस ----पुर्तगाल ---1515 ई   . --कृष्णदेवराय 
5. बारबोसा --  --  पुर्तगाल --- 1515 - 1516 ई  . --कृष्णदेवराय 
6. 
   

भारत आने वाले विदेशी यात्री व राजदूत / FOREIGN TRAVELLERS IN ANICIENT INDIA

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

भारत आने वाले  विदेशी यात्री  व राजदूत
नाम। ……………………………  शासक  …………………… समय। .......... ……………। देश

1. मेगास्थनीज़   ---         चन्द्रगुप्त मौर्य --------------325 ई पु ------यूनान 
2. डायमेकस --------बिन्दुसार हर्यकी --------------             ----------- -------- 
3. सेल्युकस  ----    
4. व्हेनसांग -----हर्षवर्द्धन  ---
5. फाह्यान --- चन्द्रगुप्त विक्रमादित्य 
6.  इत्सिंग -- 

Definition, Concept, Objectives and scope of ICT. Classification of computers on the basis of size a...

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

1. Definition

ICT stand for information and communication technologies and are defined as a “diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information”.  These technologies include computers, the Internet, broadcasting technologies (radio and television), and telephony. ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunications. It is similar to Information Technology (IT), but focuses primarily on communication technologies. This includes the Internet, wireless networks, cell phones, and other communication mediums.

Crowdsourcing

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

1.0 Introduction

Crowdsourcing is the process of connecting with large group of people via internet to tap their knowledge expertise time or resources. It is a way of solving problems and producing things by connecting online with people that you otherwise wouldn't know.      

      Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.

      Definitions and terms vary, but the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. It not only empowers business managers to expand the size of their talent pool but also allows them a deeper insight into what customers really want.

      Some of the definition of crowdsourcing:

• Crowdsourcing is any sort of outsourcing that involves a large group of people actively participating in the project.
• The practice whereby an organization enlists a variety of freelancers, paid or unpaid, to work on a specific task or problem
• “Crowdsourcing is channelling the experts' desire to solve a problem and then freely sharing the answer with everyone”  - Henk van Ess

The power of crowdsourcing was first demonstrated by the ability of the open-source movement to successfully compete with proprietary software solutions. Another example of crowdsourcing most often cited is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is collectively created and edited by volunteers.

2.0 Types of Crowdsourcing

Today, crowdsourcing is used to create and increase collective knowledge, community building, collective creativity and innovation, crowd funding, crowd voting and civic engagement.

1)    Crowd voting

2)    Crowd funding

3)    Crowdsource Design /  Creative  Crowdsourcing

4)    Micro work / Cloud labor

5)    Open Innovation

6)    Community Building

7)    Collective Knowledge

We will study the various types of crowdsourcing in the following

2.1 Crowd voting

Crowd voting refers to the concept of using crowd’s opinion to make a decision. Crowd voting leverages the community’s judgment to organize, filter and rank content such as newspaper articles, music and movies. It is the one of the most popular form of crowdsourcing, which generates the highest levels of participation.   

Crowd voting is based on the 1:10:89 rule, which states that out of 100 people:

•       1% will create something valuable
•       10% will vote and rate submissions
•       89% will consume creation

Crowd voting occurs when a website gathers a large group's opinions and judgment on a certain topic. For example - Threadless.com selects the T-shirts it sells by having users provide designs and vote on the ones they like, which are then printed and available for purchase. Despite the small nature of the company, thousands of members provide designs and vote on them, making the website’s products truly created and selected by the crowd, rather than the company.

       Some of the most famous examples have made use of social media channels: Domino's Pizza, Coca Cola and Heineken have thus crowdsourced a new pizza, song, bottle design of beer, respectively.

       The Internet offers various mechanisms to perform voting – ratings of articles by end-users or computer-driven algorithms that assess popularity via links and page views. Reality TV shows offer another example of Crowd Voting.  Some have called "American Idol" the largest crowd voting ever conducted. Threadless.com uses crowd voting to decide which T-shirts to manufacture and sell on its web site; it is thus able to assess end-consumer’s demand for new products before making investment decisions on new projects.

       According to missamerica.org, fans were able to access the Miss America website or the organization’s Facebook page to vote for their favorite contestant’s video. The contestant who received the highest number of eligible and verified votes during the voting period was chosen to participate as a finalist in the Miss America Pageant. 

       To understand crowd voting more clearly, if you've participated in an online poll, "liked" a friend's facebook post, you've already participated in crowd voting! As a matter of fact, Google’s search engine is built upon the principle of Crowd Voting; the engine's algorithm allows users to constantly "vote" on which links are most likely contain the correct data

2.2 Crowd funding

Crowd funding is the process of funding your projects by a multitude of people contributing a small amount in order to attain a certain monetary goal. It can be explained as any financial contributions from online investors, sponsors or donors to fund for-profit or non-profit initiatives or enterprises.

       Crowd funding is an approach to raising capital for new projects and businesses by soliciting contributions from a large number of stakeholders following three types of crowd funding models:

1. Donations, Philanthropy and Sponsorship where there is no expected financial return,
2. Lending and
3. Investment in exchange for equity, profit or revenue sharing.

 

       Crowd funding is circumventing traditional funding mechanisms like bank loans or venture capital. In essence, it says let's see if we can get a ton of people to chip in a very small amount of money that in aggregate can help somebody to do something.

       Some popular examples where crowd funding takes place are explained as below:

ü  IndieGoGo, established in 2008, allows anyone to set up a campaign for free. A fee is charged on money raised. Writers, musicians, film makers and visual artists often use the platform to fund projects but anyone can post any type of campaign.

ü  Kickstarter, is the biggest website for funding creative projects. It is a platform for funding creative projects. Campaigns include music, film, publishing, theater and video game projects. Contributions are pledged and only charged when/if the target figure has been reached.

2.3 Crowdsource Design / Creative Crowdsourcing

Creative Crowdsourcing is an open call to the crowd for novel and useful solutions. Tapping of creative talent pools to design and develop original art, media or content.

If you’re looking for a logo design, you can tell a crowd of designers what you want, how much you will pay, and your deadline. All interested designers will create a finished design specifically for you. You will receive many different finished logo designs, and you can keep whichever design you like the best. By doing design this way, crowdsourcing actually increases the quality & decreases the price.

 

Creative Crowdsourcing spans sourcing creative projects such as graphic design, architecture, apparel design, writing, illustration etc.

TimesSquare.com successfully employs creative crowdsourcing. From distributed problem solving in the design process to enriching consumer engagement, these companies developed the right recipe for success with the crowd.

TimesSquare.com crowdsourcing campaign – The New York publication, TimesSquare.com put creative crowdsourcing to work for the development of its new logo. The winning logo enjoys a $10,000 grand prize. On December 12, 2012, TimesSquare.com is set to reveal the new logo and the winner in Times Square with plenty of fanfare. Instead of receiving several designs from an outsourced designer, the publication has its choice of more than 5,000 potential logos.

Some of the better known creative domains that use the Crowdsourcing model include 99designs, DesignCrowd, crowdspring, Threadless, GeniusRocket  etc.

2.4 Microwork

Microwork is a crowdsourcing platform where users do small tasks for low amounts of money. Also known as "microlabor" sites, in which groups of people perform small tasks or "micro jobs”.

Microwork refers to leveraging of a distributed virtual labor pool, available on-demand to fulfill a range of tasks from simple to complex.

Crowdsourcing websites put out the open call on behalf of clients who need the micro tasks performed. Examples of these include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which offers virtual tasks done online from home, where each task requires very little time and offers a very small amount in payment.

It is also referred as Cloud Crowd, is one of the leading online workforce platforms, distributing millions of pieces of work to more than 200,000 workers.

These "microworkers" are not necessarily providing the same wisdom that the earlier forms of crowdsourcing, such as with open-source software did because each are simply following instructions from the crowdsourcer. However, this is how companies who use microlabor often label these jobs, as crowdsourcing jobs.

An example of a Mechanical Turk project is when users searched satellite images for images of a boat in order to find lost researcher Jim Gray

2.5 Open Innovation

The term Open Innovation was first developed by Henry Chesbrough in 2003, when he published Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (HBS Press).

According to Mr. Chesbrough, Open Innovation is the use of internal and other companies' ideas to develop new businesses. He identifies five key elements in the new innovation process, i.e.,  

1. Networking
2. Collaboration involving partners, competitors, universities, and users
3. Corporate Entrepreneurship, especially through corporate venturing, start-ups and spin-offs
4. Proactive Intellectual Property Management: to buy and sell intellectual property and so create markets for technology
5. Research and Development (R&D): to obtain competitive advantage on the marketplace

Open Innovation can thus be described as combining internal and external ideas as well as internal and external paths to market to advance the development of new technologies.

Open innovation allows people from all aspects of business such as investors, designers, inventors, and marketers to collaborate into a functional profit making reality. This can be done either through a dedicated web platform to gain outside perspective, or used with only internal employees.

 

Open Innovation – Examples:

GE Ecomagination Challenge - This is a platform in which GE reaches out to businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators and students with breakthrough ideas on energy issues. There has been 2 challenges so far.

Xerox - Open Xerox is the place where you can experiment with technologies being developed in the Xerox labs around the globe

SAP - The Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) Network enhances the capabilities of SAP’s partner and customer ecosystem through an integrated network of world-wide expertise, and best-in-class technologies and platforms.

2.6 Community Building

Community Building is development of communities through active engagement of individuals who share common interests.

Groups that share a concern or a passion about a topic who deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an on-going basis. (Wenger et al, 2002)

 

2.6.1 Building Communities of Practice (CoPs) 

Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.

In a nutshell, Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interacts regularly to learn how to do it better.

Not everything called a "community" is a community of practice. A neighborhood, for instance, is often called a community but is usually not a community of practice. Three characteristics are crucial:

   1. The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.

   2. The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.

   3. The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest—people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, and ways of addressing recurring problems— in short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

It is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community.

Domain of interest

—  Commitment to domain

—  Shared competence

Community

—  Members engage in joint activities

—  Share information

—  Build relationships & learn from each other

Shared Practice

—  Community of practitioners

—  Develop a shared repertoire of resources

—  Sustained interaction

Communities encourage sharing of digital teaching and learning resources. Each Community works towards creating quality learning resources for their subject areas.

2.7 Collective Knowledge / Intelligence

Collective Knowledge or Collective Intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. It is development of knowledge assets or information resources from a distributed pool of contributors.

 

According to Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, collective intelligence is mass collaboration. In order for this concept to happen, four principles need to exist;

Openness

Sharing ideas and intellectual property: though these resources provide the edge over competitors more benefits accrue from allowing others to share ideas and gain significant improvement and scrutiny through collaboration.

Peering

Horizontal organization as with the ‘opening up’ of the Linux program where users are free to modify and develop it provided that they make it available for others. Peering succeeds because it encourages self-organization – a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.

Sharing

Companies have started to share some ideas while maintaining some degree of control over others, like potential and critical patent rights. Limiting all intellectual property shuts out opportunities, while sharing some expands markets and brings out products faster.

Acting Globally

The advancement in communication technology has prompted the rise of global companies at low overhead costs. The internet is widespread, therefore a globally integrated company has no geographical boundaries and may access new markets, ideas and technology

The promise of Collective Knowledge can be summarized in one concept: building a knowledge ecosystem.  This brings two great benefits for both organizations and customers: access to SME (Subject Matter Experts) that are not part of the organization’s support structure and generating knowledge that can be leveraged extensively throughout that ecosystem.

As with any other ecosystem, the use of platforms and open and free access is a must; “walled gardens” where the knowledge is not free to everyone and everything is then opposite of what a Collective Knowledge model should be.

2.7.1      Benefits of using Collective Knowledge:

1. Access To-The-Moment Expertise – the best source of knowledge for any organization remains outside of their walls.  The users are the ones who know better how to use (and how to fix) any product or service – even in cases where it remains the organization’s responsibility to assist them (cable providers needing to reset a modem, for example).  The users usually know first, before the organization, problems and likely solutions and workarounds.  Being able to access them faster than traditional methods means the organization can get a head-start in warding off calls from customers, acting proactively in certain instances, and deliver effective answers to those calls that do get through.

1. Validation For Their Actions And Knowledge – in those cases where an organization does create a knowledge entry the access to the Collective Knowledge provides validation.  There is nothing faster to know if a fix or new feature works that releasing it to users.  The problem until know has been to find sufficient users to test and ensure the new or fixed feature works as expected (and does not break anything else).  Thanks to online communities and Collective Knowledge these issues can be quickly and efficiently solved, tested, and released to the entire population – with almost immediate validation.

1. Feedback For Their Products And Services – leverage for the collective knowledge has to extend beyond the traditional customer service functions typically associated with KM.  Feedback, and the routing of the information to research and development departments as well as other places throughout the organization, is one of the hidden values of Collective Knowledge.  It has been proven that users are more “truthful” (or less biased in a better sense) in online communities where Collective Knowledge typically is collected.  The ability to parse the information they provide, distill insights, and use those to improve products and services (or even create new ones if necessary) is the underlying power of co-creation events associated with social networks.

1. Reduced Costs Through Indirect Outsourcing – although much has been done about reducing the costs of knowledge generation and maintenance by letting users handle it in online communities, the reality is that it is not always true.  In some cases, the costs will likely increase as the need to accommodate unknown processes and elements associated with knowledge may result in extra personnel, licenses, or even lengthier processing time.  However, Marketing has proven that generating market knowledge, previously done by market research firms over far longer times and at a much greater expense, from consumers on collective environments is faster and cheaper than previously done.  Customer service has proven similar by offloading multi-channel transactions from man-powered ones to collective environments where other users provide answers.  It takes finding the right use cases, and making sure that the knowledge generated supports the needs.

1. Source Of Knowledge To Augment And Improve Repositories – in addition to the up-to-the-moment access to latest-and-greatest information, organizations can leverage Collective Knowledge to power, improve, and maintain their existing knowledge repositories.  This source of knowledge, whether it is an original source creating the knowledge or a secondary force aiding in the maintenance and grooming of the same, is the ultimate leverage. Organizations that understand how to use these setups enjoy better knowledge bases, more complete and more relevant.  The savings in resources and the benefits of delivering more effective solutions to their clients more than justified the time and patience to implement Collective Knowledge.

Collective Intelligence & Prediction platforms

ü  Inkling Markets - use wisdom of the crowd for forecasting

ü  Intrade - global prediction markets

ü  NewsFutures - collective intelligence markets

ü  Ushahidi - crowdsourcing crisis information

ü  Kaggle - data mining and forecasting

Case Study : DSpace

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

Case Study : DSpace

Introduction

Digital libraries are nothing but services related to management and organization of available digital information and its retrieval with proper user interfacing. It also include archiving and preservation of digital material, social issues attached to the same along with its application and evaluation to specific focused areas. To achieve all there are certain expectation from the software or solution which helps to create digital libraries.

For a proper digital library solution, primarily it is being expected that

• it should be cost effective in terms of hardware and software platform to be procured and  management there after.
• The digital library software is also expected to be technically simple, easy to install and manage, so that a layman with working knowledge of Information technology can install and administer the same.
•  The solution should be robust and scalable in such a way that, it can handle large volume of data seamlessly along with inter-operable modular open architecture so that the necessary customization can be done easily without being dependent on software specialists.
• Digital Library software should have user friendly, multi user interface so that multiple entities can use and administer the software simultaneously.
• It is also desirable that it should be platform independent so it can run on any popular software and hardware platform.
• Last but not least, it must have capability to handle all types of digital object, the object can be data set, document, multimedia or say any digital format.

There is one stop solution, which meets all the expectations described above, that is DSpace, It is a platform that;

• captures items in any format and distributes it over the web,
• indexes digital items so user can easily search and retrieve them,
• preserve the digital content over the long term.

DSpace is typically being used to create digital library with three major roles ; First, it facilitates capture and ingestion of material with associated metadata; Second, DSpace provides easy access to the material with user friendly searching and listing mechanisms; Third, it facilitates long term preservation of digital material.

When initiated (in year 2000), DSpace was a joint project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewllet-Packard , DSpace project is now being handled by DuraSpace, a non-for-profit organization.

Key factors to DSpace’s adaption

DSpace has become quite popular among digital library implementers because it is open source and freely available software; it is being backed by very large worldwide user community who are ready to help.

DSpace software has been packaged in a way that it is very easy to use, It handles content in number of digital format, and the major advantage is; contents in DSpace can be made searchable through search engines like Google scholar, thus one can increase outreach of digital library without much effort.

DSpace can be used to store any type of digital material, it can store journal papers, Data Sets, Electronic Theses, Reports, Conference posters, Video’s , images. Logically speaking DSpace can be used to store any material which is available in digital format.

DSpace is basically an open source software available under Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence , where in one can use and redistribute source as well as binaries or executable programme. DSpace software can be obtained from www.dspace.org or SourceForge’s dspace project site.

DSpace is having community based development model, where in there is SVN (subversion) based common source code control repository, which is having dedicated committers and contributors. This developer community welcomes every one to submit bug reports, patches, feature requests and other related things. There are number of active discussion groups and email lists are available for dspace support.

DSpace Information Model

Information Model of dspace is broadly divided in four components, that is Communities, Collections, Items and Bitstreams.

Community reflects the unit of an organization, collection in each community is distinct grouping of items, Items are logical content objects where as bitstreams are individual files.

The way data is organized in DSpace is supposed to reflect the structure of the organization and its digital collection.

Each DSpace site is divided into communities, which can be further divided into sub-communities reflecting the typical university structure of college, department, research centre, or laboratory. Communities contain collections, which are groupings of related content. A collection may appear in more than one community. Each collection is composed of items, which are the basic archival elements of the archive. Each item is owned by one collection. Additionally, an item may appear in additional collections; however every item has one and only one owning collection.

Items are further subdivided into named bundles of bitstreams. Bitstreams are, as the name suggests, streams of bits, usually ordinary computer files.

As discussed earlier, communities and collections are used to organize digital content or items in to a hierarchical form, It also contain limited set of descriptive metadata like name, description, licence and availability for that particular community and collection etc.digital library implementer can create communities based on logical grouping of digital items and then further subdivide in to the collections.

Items are logical units of content which consist Dublin core based metadata, as well as other metadata which has been encoded as bitstream. The item can be an electronic thesis, an e-book, photographs, a complete web page which can include images and style sheets associated with HTML page. Each item can contain one or multiple files along with metadata.

DSpace facilitates all three type of metadata that is Descriptive, Administrative and Structural. Descriptive metadata can by any thing which describes the item; it takes care of all elements of Dublin Core metadata set. Dspace also supports non Dublin Core metadata; these elements may not be searchable. Administrative metadata associated with an item can be  access restrictions, means who can access, remove or modify and item, there is no standard format available for these type of metadata.Structural metadata describes very basic attributes about item, for example what are the bitstream that contained in an item, or under which community and collection that item belongs to.

Bitstreams are individual digital files, which are having limited set of descriptive metadata like name, size of the file, format of the file etc. A pdf file, word doument, jpeg or bmp picture, executable program etc can be considered as bitstream.

Bundles are basically nothing but group of related files, for example, when you have a HTML page, it may also contain link to other HTML documents, images, flash object etc; therefore to view that html page, you also need to have all associated file, therefore html file along with other associated files makes a bundle. Dspace doesn’t support any metadata for bundles.

2.1 DSpace System Architecture

The architecture of DSpace has been divided in to three major parts, that is DSpace public API on the top, business logic layer in the middle and Storage API at the bottom.

(Image Courtesy: http://www.dspace.org)

DSpace public API takes care of user interfacing and services, it contains components for web user interfacing, Federation services, Metadata providing services as defined by Open Archive Initiative’s protocol, interfaces for web services like SWORD which is Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit etc.

These public API components interacts with business logic layer in the middle, which provides search and browse components, Handle manager, History manager which takes care of logs and statistics. Business logic layer also contains components to manage ingestion process and workflow, components to manage e-persons, groups and their authorization along with content management API and administrative toolkit.

The bottom layer, the storage api has been two major components, one is Relational Database Management System wrapper which connects to RDBMS like Postgres or Oracle through Java Database Connectivity and the Bitstream storage manager which directly interact with file system to store bitstreams.

Major Features of DSpace

3.1           Metadata Registry

Dspace provides facility to create new metadata registry or manage existing dublin core metadata registry, where in digital library implementer can manage and customize metadata elements.Metadata registry has three major components that is Schema, Element and Qualifier.

3.2           File Format Registry

In addition to metadata registry dspace also features registry to handle file formats, this file formats can be managed based on three levels that is supported, known and unknown. Here dspace administrator can specify MIME type, Name, Long Description and support level of the file along with file extension.

3.3           E-Persons

Persons or users who interact with dspace are called e-people, it is basically dspace user accounts, dspace provides facility to permit these e-people to login to the site, sign up to receive notification changes to subscription, submit new items to the collections, Administer collection / communities or entire dspace site.These e-people can also be managed by forming  groups.

3.4           Authorization

Authorization system in dspace enables administrators to give e-people the ability to perform add and remove operation by which an e-person can remove or add any community, collection or item.

As a collection administrator e-person can edit an item’s metadata, withdraw items or can map the items in to the collection Write permission enables e-person to add or remove bitstreams, where as read permission enables only reading of bitstreams.

3.5           Ingestion Process and Work Flow

Ingestion process is nothing but getting or putting contents in to Dspace. Dspace facilitates batch import as well as web based submisstion.

In batch import, multiple items can be submitted to dspace in one shot, this requires item to be in specific format along with metadata encoded in XML. Whereas in web based submission only one item can go each time, the item being submitted has to go through a work flow process defined for that collection. Assume that there are three steps

Step 1: May reject the submission

Step 2: Edit metadata or reject

Step 3: Edit Metadata

Image Courtesy http://www.dspace.org

A collection's workflow can have up to three steps as shown in figure above. Each collection may have an associated e-person group for performing each step; if no group is associated with a certain step, that step is skipped. If a collection has no e-person groups associated with any step, submissions to that collection are ingested straight into the main archive.

In other words, the sequence is this: The collection receives a submission. If the collection has a group assigned for workflow step 1, that step is invoked, and the group is notified. Otherwise, workflow step 1 is skipped. Likewise, workflow steps 2 and 3 are performed if and only if the collection has a group assigned to those steps.

When a step is invoked, the submission is put into the 'task pool' of the step's associated group. One member of that group takes the task from the pool, and it is then removed from the task pool, to avoid the situation where several people in the group may be performing the same task without realizing it.

3.6           Search and Browse

DSpace allows end-users to discover content in a number of ways, that is via external reference, such as a handle searching for one or more keywords in metadata or extracted full-text. It also provides option for browsing through title, author, date or subject indices, with optional image thumbnails etc.

3.7           Handle System

In present web world Universal Resource Location – URL of a digital content may change due to change in hardware or software, change in network or because of political change. This can be handled by creating a permanent URL independent of the repository. Handle system in DSpace provides a persistent handle for each item, if configured properly.

3.8           OAI-PMH Support

The Open Archives Initiative has developed a protocol for metadata harvesting. This allows sites to programmatically retrieve or 'harvest' the metadata from several sources, and offer services using that metadata, such as indexing or linking services. Such a service could allow users to access information from a large number of sites from one place. DSpace exposes the Dublin Core metadata for items that are publicly accessible. Additionally, the collection structure is also exposed via the OAI protocol's 'sets' mechanism.

3.9           Statistics

DSpace offers system statistics for administrator usage, as well as usage statistics on the level of items, communities and collections. Dspace also provide  customizable general overview of activities in the archive, by default including:

• Number of items archived
• Number of bitstream views
• Number of item page views
• Number of collection page views
• Number of community page views
• Number of user logins
• Number of searches performed
• Number of license rejections
• Number of OAI Requests

3.10           SWORD and Open URL Support.

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) is a protocol that allows the remote deposit of items into repositories. SWORD was further developed in SWORD version 2 to add the ability to retrieve, update, or delete deposits. DSpace supports the SWORD protocol via the 'sword' web application and SWord v2 via the swordv2 web application

DSpace supports the OpenURL protocol from SFX, in a rather simple fashion. If your institution has an SFX server, DSpace will display an OpenURL link on every item page, automatically using the Dublin Core metadata. Additionally, DSpace can respond to incoming OpenURLs too.

Customization in DSpace

Dspace provides varios flexibility and customization options, the areas that can be customized are;

• Submission process, in which one can configure the submission steps to suit organization.
• One can also customize Browse and search terms in which fields and files can be chosen to index and display in the browse interface.
• Dspace also provides flexibility to choose Database; one can choose Postgres or Oracle.
• DSpace can be customized to work with other web services- using Light Network Interface one can pull or push content to or from DSpace
• One can create own user interface for interacting with DSpace.

Some Live Examples

• INFLIBNET’s Institutional Repository : http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in
• ShodhGanga Indian ETD Repository:http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in
• Digital Repository of Raman Research Institute : http://dspace.rri.res.in/

References

http://www.dspace.org

07 Collection Development in Digital Library

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

G

Glossary

GLOSSARY

Access - Applied to delivery, instructions, methods; with electronic resources, ensuring the proper technological software, hardware, and internet connections, as well as providing user instructions on how to use effectively these materials, are a key part in the role of access to electronic resources. Delivery of electronic resources can arrive in a variety of formats, such as HTML or PDF documents, as well as through various download or ILL means. Methods of access vary from in-library connections, proxy servers, link servers, and virtual access to materials.

Acquisition(s) - The collective process, by which new library material is researched,
approved, funded and screened.

Annual renewals - The contract period for electronic resources is typically for a oneyear
period, requiring renewals each year.

Archiving (related to policy) - Library-specific rules governing the retaining and storage
of material, as well as subsequent requests for access to the same.

ARL - Association of Research Libraries. The ARL is an organization of the leading
research libraries in North America.

ATOM - The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication
Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol
(AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web
Resources

Authorized users - A set or subset of library users who have been given access to
material not in the public domain via library resources; may vary by kind of library
meaning it will be different in an academic or public or special library; may or may not
include walk-in users.

Back files - The past issues of journals; back files are often included as part of an
electronic resource’s package but will also no longer be available upon termination of
the current subscription to a journal.

Bundled - Single items sold as part of a package; this is a common purchase option for
e-Journals or e-Books from a publisher or provider.

CD-ROM - An electronic resource format that contains up to 650-900MB of information
on a single-sided, single-layer optical disc.

Codes of Practice - A set of written rules describing how to evaluate electronic
resources and usage statistics; ICOLC, ARL, NISO, and JISC are some of the common
standards available for evaluation.

Collection development - Also known as collection management; collection
development is the general description for the selection, acquisition, and analysis of
materials in relation to an institution’s materials needs.

Collection development policy - A policy developed by a library to determine the
subject areas and materials a library actively collects as resources; the policy may
include details on the mission of the library and the processes of selection and deaccession.


Completeness of content - Assurance that online content is at least equivalent to
earlier print versions, represents complete, faithful and timely replications of previous
formats and if not, Licensor will cooperate with Licensee to correct errors, omissions
and remedy the situation.
Compliance with users with disabilities - A requirement that the Licensor shall make
reasonable efforts to comply with legislation so that visually or hearing impaired or
physically challenged users can obtain access to information content in e-Resource
collections; encourages ergonomic best practices.
Consortia or consortium - Institutional membership affiliation that allows for members
to license or acquire specified content from publisher or provider based on negotiated
terms and prices available only to members.

Continuing - Perpetual access; continuing access is common upon renewal of
electronic resource subscription.

Contract terms - The rules and restrictions governing the access and use of a resource;
items included in the contract terms may include topics such as IP address activation,
remote access, and other customization issues.

Cost per use - The cost of using a resource; this relates to the statistical analysis cost
comparison of purchasing a resource as part of a contract versus the cost of individual
interlibrary loan requests for specific patrons. If the usage frequency is high, the cost
per use of a licensed item decreases. Infrequent usage may merit the cost of individual
ILL requests that are lower than a yearly subscription.

COUNTER compliant usage statistics (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked
Electronic Resources) - The requirement to provide COUNTER statistics in Microsoft
Excel or as a file that can be imported into Excel spreadsheets to allow diagram and
graphic creation along with the statistics.

Course packages or packs - A package of material assembled for a particular course;
materials may include handouts, slides, websites, or other materials necessary for
students learning in a specific course.

Course reserves - Electronic copies of book chapters, articles, or other library
materials assembled electronically for use by students enrolled in a particular course.
.

Delivery (applied to models, access, resources) - The process of providing access to a
resource; in libraries, delivery of materials may be done via proxy servers, link servers,
ILL, or the internet in general.

Digital materials - Materials available in a digital or electronic format; examples include
CD-ROM, DVD, e-journals, and web sites.

Drop-out clause - The clause in a license agreement that allows the library to withdraw
or cancel a subscription, typically at the beginning of the license’s term.

Dublin Core - The Dublin Core set of metadata elements provides a small and
fundamental group of text elements through which most resources can be described
and catalogued.

E-Book - Electronic book - A book provided in a digital format for checkout or use via
an Internet browser, a computer, or another electronic device like an E-Book Reader.

E-Journal - Electronic journal - A journal provided in a digital format for access via an
Internet browser, a computer or other electronic device.

E-mail - Electronic Mail - Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another via
computer and also can be sent to a large number of addresses simultaneously.

Fiscal year - The 12-month financial period in which the library manages expenses; the
fiscal year can differ from the calendar year, as US government agencies operate on a
June-May fiscal calendar.

Full-text - The format option that will provide the full-text of a document instead of just a
citation or abstract; full-text documents from electronic databases are typically available
in PDF (Portable document format) or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

Governing institution - The institution responsible for major decisions regarding eresources; for example, the university would be the governing institution for an
academic library or the consortia, as a group, would be the governing institution to
handle the financial and legal issues related to e-resource acquisition and access.

Grace period - A period of time that allows access despite the immediate receipt of
payment; a one-month grace period is typical between renewal date and receipt of
renewal payment.

ICOLC - International Coalition of Library Consortia - An informal organization of
library consortia; the group focuses on consortia related to higher education.

ICOLC Guidelines - A set of guidelines defining the content and form of statistical data
regarding usage of electronic resources; in 1998, the document titled Guidelines for
Statistical Measures of Usage of Web-Based Indexed, Abstracted, and Full Text
Resources. In 2001, the Guidelines were revised and re-issued under the title
Guidelines for Statistical Measures of Usage of Web-Based Information Resources.

ILL - Interlibrary Loan - The method of resource sharing by placing resource requests
at another library to enable access to one’s own library patron; common methods of ILL

involve the use of the ARIEL document delivery services or the digitization and
electronic transfer of a resource.

Information/resource provider - The general term for an individual, company or group
providing an information resource; vendors are one example of an information provider.

Information resource(s) - The general term for a resource containing information;
websites, raw statistical datasets, and e-books are examples of information resources.

Institutional archives - An archive of materials created and hosted by the home
institution.

IP- Internet Protocol - The IP is the principal protocol used for relaying datagrams
(packets) across a telcommunications network. Responsible for routing packets across
network boundaries, it is the primary protocol that establishes the Internet.

IP Authentication - The method electronic resource providers use to verify the access
credentials of a user and confirm a library’s subscription to a resource based upon the
IP address of the user.

JISC - Joint Information Systems Committee – A UK Committee that supports higher
education and research by providing leadership in the use of information and
communications technology.

Lease - A short-term contract to rent or borrow access to a resource.

Legal Counsel – A legal officer providing support and advice about Intellectual Property
& other legal issues.

Legal jurisdiction - Legal domicile for which law must comply.

License - A legal agreement between parties authorizing the use and service of an item
provided by one party and utilized by the other.

License year - The defined period of time in which the license agreement remains
active and enforceable.

Licensing - The act of developing and contracting a license agreement.


Licensing agency - The information provider and copyright holder that hosts access to
resources.

Licensing agreement – A legal agreement between parties, defining terms of use, cost,
period of access, and other issues related to the use and service of an item provided by
one party and utilized by the other

Link resolver - A software pointer that brings together information about a cited
resource and the library's subscriptions to assist users in finding full-text copies of
articles without conducting new searches in other resources; libraries often use
OpenURL standard for creating link resolvers; libraries often provide a “Find Full-Text”
button next to a citation as an example of a link resolver.

LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe”) - A storage method created by
Stanford University that focuses on redundancy in information backup by providing
multiple storage servers.

METS - Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard - a metadata standard for
encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a
digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web
Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC
Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of
the Digital Library Federation.

Multimedia - The combination of several different communications techniques such as
sound, text, still images, film, etc.

NISO – National Information Standards Organization – The NISO is a United States
non-profit standards organization that develops, maintains and publishes technical
standards related to publishing, bibliographic and library applications.

On-going (Continual or perpetual) - refers to the access period for an electronic
resource.

Open URL - A URL that contains metadata information to help connect users with
citation or indexed information to target information, such as a full-text article.

Package - Like a bundle, selecting multiple titles either by subject grouping or individual
titles from a publisher or provider.

Patron-Driven acquisition - A new trend in collection development selection where
library users can select from an inventory of holdings loaded in a public union catalog
for which a library provides access and a library acquires it for its permanent holdings
after an agreed upon number of accesses; suggests a new model of collection profiling
based on need and other critical parameters regarding readership levels, publisher, cost,
collection profile, etc. Most importantly, it can be low risk and user-centered at time of
need if managed carefully.

Pay-per-view - The method of purchasing access to material at the moment of usage
instead of part of usage subscription.

PDF - Portable document format; this file format allows requires a PDF reader such as
Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Preview.

Perpetual access - The concept of maintaining continual access to a resource; given
the limitations of subscriptions and licensing access, archiving and digital repositories
are other options for providing perpetual access to a resource.

Post-print - A copy of the final draft of a research article, as published.

Pre-print - A draft of a research article prior to official publication in a journal.

Private use - The use of a publication by an individual for the purpose of personal
research.

Proxy Server - A server that acts as a filter for client information requests where access
is stored on a separate server; proxy servers are often used to authenticate users prior
to granting access to licensed content and commercial databases.

Publisher(s) - An individual or company that publishes a resource.

Purchase – The act of buying or subscribing to an item.

RDF - The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium
specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as
a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is
implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.

Remote access - The access and use of library databases outside of the physical
library via Proxy servers or other web-based authentication.

Renewals - The agreement to continue or extend a contract.
RSS - originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication – A family
of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries,

news headlines etc. in a standardized format. An RSS document includes full or
summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

Self-archiving - The web posting or repository depositing of an author’s work into the
author’s home institution’s repository; for example, a professor depositing a copy of his
or her published article into his or her university’s repository.

Selection - The act of choosing; for electronic resources, review of collection
development policies, institutional standards, and patrons needs are some of the
elements that affect electronic resource selection.

Selector(s) - The term used to describe the individual or individuals responsible for
selecting materials for a library or consortium’s collection.

Server - A computer with a large amount of storage space and linked to other
computers either through an internal computer network or the Internet.

SFX (Special Effects) - An OpenURL link resolver common in libraries.

Stable access - Access to a resource without network outages or failures.

Stand alone - A resource that is an independent, self-contained resource.

Subscribing institution – Differentiating from an individual owner or subscriber, when
an organization or library subscribes to content, the terms may be different, especially
for methods and terms of access and allowing for access to media included in the form
of a CD or DVD inserted with a print volume.

Subscription - Payment made to gain access to a resource or a service.

Third Party - A party involved in a situation even though it is not one of the two main
parties involved; a subscription agent is a third party to information providers and
libraries.

Training and support - Refers to additional software to support installation of content;
can be made available via e-Mail, phone or fax during regular business hours and
involves problem-solving and troubleshooting; can also include “train the trainer”
sessions for library staff via in-person or webinars, etc..

Unauthorized use - The Licensee shall not knowingly permit anyone other than
Authorized Users to use the Licensed Materials.

UNICODE (as in compliance) - A standard set of characters and symbols shared
across multiple languages to ensure consistent representation in binary form; UNICODE
compliance is important to prevent information loss and enable accurate recall.

Up-time - The period of time that a resource is available and up on the network or
Internet.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator - The address of a digital document on the Internet.

Use, User, Usage statistics - The frequency of resource access as made by patrons;
usage statistics, or the total numbers of times each resource is accessed, is used for
evaluation purposes.

User training or instruction - Library instruction or bibliographic instruction for users
about how to navigate a source, find and search for information, or increase information
literacy

Vendor - An individual or institution selling or leasing a resource.

Walk-in user - Visitors who have permission to use the institution’s publicly available
computers and shall have access to the licensed resource.

XML - Extensible Markup Language - A markup language similar to SGML but simpler
in structure due to greater rules; XML serves as the language used for creating
metadata for library collections via standards such as Dublin Core and METS (Metadata
Encoding Transmission Standard) and Internet resources via RSS and ATOM feeds.

......................................................................................................................................................................

1.Introduction

The most important component of a digital library is the digital collection it holds or has access to. Viability and extent of usefulness of a digital library depends upon the critical mass of digital collection it has. The digital collection infrastructure, typically consists of three components, i.e. collection, digital object and metadata.The collection represent organised set of digital object, object represent the digital material and metadata provides bibliographic or index information for the digital objects and collection. While digital objects are the primary documents that users wish to access, it is metadata that facilitate their identification and location using variety of search techniques. Information contents of a digital library, depending on the media type it contain, may include a combination of structured / unstructured text, numerical data, scanned images, graphics, audio and video recordings. Different types of resources need to be handled differently in a digital library.  

2.0 Collection Development The libraries, irrespective of media types, i.e. print, audio-visual or digital, are primarily responsible for identifying, selecting, organizing, preserving and providing access to resources to their users. The traditional libraries will not become digital libraries, but will rather acquire access to ever growing digital collections for their users. Collection management in a digital or hybrid library need to have pre-defined policies and practicies similar to those being followed in traditional library while keeping in view the issues and complexities that are especically related to digital materials. Important processes involved in collection development in digital environment are: identification, selection, licensing or purchase of digital materials. 2.1 Identification Collection management is a challenging area of activity in digital or hybrid environment. With recent developments in ICT, individuals and institutions publish their own contents on the web and make them accessible for a fee or free. While most traditional publishers make their products available in print as well as in digital format, several new publishers offer their products in digital formats only. The digital contents, therefore, may not be available through well-established distribution and marketing channels that exists for printed publications making it difficult to identify them. Moreover, there is no effective bibliographic control over products and services generated by electronic publishing and selection tools such as national bibliographies and union catalogues that exist for printed publications are not available for electronic resources. Identification process for an electronic resource can be time-consuming and laborious. Digital materials are often software or machine dependent. It may require a specific software or hardware to function properly. The process of identification and selection of e-resources, therefore, requires an understanding of the library’s existing computing and network environment, as well as understanding of trends in the development of electronic information resources. The Library must ensure that it has adequate technical infrastructure to support access or to host a resource being purchased / leased. Technical infrastructure may have to be evaluated in terms of computer platform and operating system, initial storage capacity and rate of growth, software required to access or manage the resource, frequency of updates, network capabilities, storage and distribution media, cost of maintenance, access limitation (multi-user or stand-alone), site limitation, etc. 2.2 Selection The selection of e-resources for digital library is a complicated process. The electronic resources have more issues than the print resources such as different access method, infrastructure, pricing and licencing, ownership, format and standards.  This selection process involve collect request from the user for new resources and feedback about the existing resources, usage statistics of the previous year and the selection review based on the collection policy of the organisation. The library should also inform users about new content and services as well as potential temporary problems accessing electronic resources. 2.3 Selection criteria for electronic resources Selection criteria that are applicable in traditional library apply to selection of electronic resources in a hybrid library.  These criteria include: relevance to actual or potential users, scope and content, depth of the existing collection in the subject, currency and validity of information, cost-effectiveness, intellectual level and quality of information, authority of producer, uniqueness and completeness of information, etc. Some important criteria that should be considered while selection and acquisition of digital information resources are as follows:  2.3.1 Content The electronic resource must support research needs of the organisation. The resource will add depth to the existing collection Information must be current and updated regularly along with the print counterpart. The resources should come from an authoritative author, publisher with peer and professionally reviewed Accuracy and completeness as compared with print format. This means that the electronic resource should have all the articles, illustrations, graphs and tables as they appear in the print counterpart. 2.3.2 Functionality The electronic resource will provide sufficient added value over the print equivalent or other formats. The interface should be user-friendly. Some common user friendliness features are introductory screens, online tutorials, context-sensitive help, and pop-ups and menus. The search and retrieval software must be powerful and flexible. Some features that should be available include command search, index and title browsing, truncation, auto-stem, thesaurus, history and alert/SDI. Preferably, the user interface should be consistent with other interfaces currently in use. The system should support multiple export options (email, printing, and downloading.) and provision of citation downloads to citation management software The system should provide access to other electronic resources and support resource integration via reference and full-text linking. Interface should provide transliteration facility to search non-roman scripts 2.3.3 Access Preferably, the electronic resource should be available for remote access. The Libraries prefer access to remote hosts via Web to other formats and methods of access, such as CDROM, local Web mount, etc., because it offers optimum access , faster updating, cost savings in storage The Libraries prefer IP filtering to other methods of authentication, such as login and password authentication. The electronic resource should be compatible across different platforms (PC, Mac, etc.) Though local installation and maintenance are not preferred, if chosen, the electronic resource must be compatible with the existing hardware and software. If the electronic resource requires any special hardware, software, audio and/or video capabilities, the Librarian and staff should be consulted. 2.3.4 Technical Support The vendor of the electronic resource should be established and reliable. The electronic resource should be available for trial. Preferably, the vendor will provide product demonstrations if needed. If needed, the vendor should provide initial and, preferably, on-going product training. Customer and technical support should be timely, accurate and professional. The vendor should provide quality statistical reporting. Preferably, the reports should follow international standards for statistical measures of usage of web -based information resources and/or COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources)'s Code of Practice . The vendor should be prepared to respond to the Libraries' requests for customization, branding and provision of MARC records and URLs. The vendor should provide advance notifications for content and platform changes, as well as system down time. 2.3.5 Pricing The vendor should offer a choice of pricing models from which the Libraries may select. These models could be based on various criteria, including the number of simultaneous users and user population. Pricing models that are based on FTE it should be based on the size on the actual user group and not the total user population. A specialized electronic resource should not be charged based on the total user population of the University. The cost of providing access and the cost of content should be separate. Preferably, the subscription fee for a licensed electronic resource should include permanent rights to use the information that has been paid for in the event that the electronic resource is subsequently cancelled. Alternatively, the vendor should offer either a purchase option (e.g. netLibrary PrePaid model) or a combined model with a one-off archive fee and an annual access fee for more current content (e.g. JSTOR model.) The Libraries should not be required to purchase both the print and electronic versions of a resource. The cost of the electronic resource should not exceed that of the print counterpart. An increase in price from print to electronic format, and from CD-ROM to Web, should be reflected in the increase in functionality and accessibility. The vendor should be prepared to offer consortia pricing. Pay-per-use pricing Packaged pricing- requiring purchase of a specific group of titles Back files, archiving and post termination rights- the purchasing or leasing of electronic data should include provision for perpetual access to that data Renewals – the vendor should notify well in advance for renewal. In the consortia based subscription, the publisher seek permission from the individual library before renewal   2.4 Selection Criteria for Internet Resources In the world wide web enormous resources available in free of cost in variety of format and document type, such as web pages, blogs, forum, full-text online version of e-book and e-journal, Govt. documents and etc. Apart from the subscribed e-resources the free resources should be identified through subject portal and other website and included in the digital collection. While selecting the free resources the following criteria should be met. The collection should be from the reputed organisation website and authenticated by the reputed organisation Website is reviewed by a reputable source. The website is accessible freely with the existing infrastructure available within the organisation Site is stable with infrequent down times and compatible format available in the market. Policy of periodic review and update of content, with a date of revision statement for websites. E-books, journals, and other documents should have dates of publication or posting. Good design with visual appeal and easy navigation of contents within the site, e.g. site index or search engine. 2.5 Licencing Consideration Most electronic resources are licensed to the subscribing institutions with a written agreement that contains detailed explanation about user’s rights and restrictions on usage. E-resources are leased or made accessible on annual payment and are not sold, therefore, libraries do not own the material in digital environment, instead they license or lease access to digital material on behalf of their users for a defined period of time and under certain terms and conditions usually defined by the publishers in their license agreements. It is, therefore, necessary that the librarians or purchase personnel have full understanding of terms of license agreement before selection of an e-resource. Currently, there are no standards for licenses, each producer / publisher have their own proprietary license agreement with terms and conditions set forth by them. The librarians or purchase personnel are, therefore, required to carefully study the license document before signing them. It is a common practice that clauses of license documents are modified or clauses specified by licensee are added to the agreement based on negotiations between licensee and licensor. Sections of agreement that should be carefully understood and modified, if need be are: authorised users, limitations on usage, responsibility of institution for monitoring or controlling access, archival access to subscribed contents (specially for subscribed period), responsibility for actions of users, basic rights of users / institutions under “fair use doctrine”, legal jurisdictions in case of dispute, etc. The library should seek modifications or inclusion of clauses in the agreement that are required to support scholarship and research and educational use as well as those rights that are considered “fair use” for printed materials. International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has developed model license agreements that can be studied before selection of resources and signing a license document.  2.5.1. Access V/s Archiving Selection process should also address the issue of remote access v/s local hosting, wherever applicable. Remote access essentially means that the access is provided usually via Internet through the publisher’s web server. There are around 40,000 electronic journals that are made accessible online by some 4,000 publishers.  Several journal publishers do not own the technology that is required to access, search and manage their contents. Publishers either license the technology or contract the entire electronic publishing and hosting to a third-party company specializing in this area. Most publisher- predominantly offer access model.  This model is a threat to the existing role of library as institutions entrusted with the task of archiving scholarly publications. It is possible for libraries to negotiate local archiving and hosting rights with individual publishers. Publishers may deliver the content only without providing the technology to search, browse and navigate. Even if the publisher provides a mirror site, it is impractical for libraries to maintain the contents locally with an array of distributed contents on different software and technology platforms.  Local hosting of contents from different publishers may require significant infrastructure in terms of computing and network resources as well as local technical expertise.  Authorized Users' should be defined as broadly as possible. ( all person with current authenticated affiliation with the subscription organisation include employee, student, visiting researcher and etc.) Authorized Sites' should be defined as broadly as possible. Authorized users should be permitted to access the electronic resource from anywhere via the University's secure network. Access should be permitted via IP authentication for the entire institution, including simultaneous access for multiple user. Archiving policy-The resource provider should provide a clearly articulated archiving policy for the licenced resources Perpetual access-The provider shall grant access to the licensed content of the resource for the mutually agreed time period. The purchasing or leasing of electronic data should include provision for perpetual access to that data. Following any termination of the license agreement the institution’s perpetual electronic access to the previously subscribed content should be guaranteed. Institutional archives / self-archiving- the resource provider should allow an individual institution of author to upload its faculty’s work to its IR either in pre or post print format 2.5.2 Use of the Electronic Information Resources The license should permit fair use of all information for non-commercial, educational, instructional, and research purposes by the Libraries and authorized users. These include viewing, downloading, and printing. Other uses permitted under fair use are ILL, e-reserves and course packs. Pay-per-view services to access articles which are not available in the library’s print or digital collection Courser packages- the vendor should permit to user electronic resource in the course pack and other educational purpose User statistics- the information provider give user statistics in the appropriate format to the concern library or consortia administrator In general, the vendor should employ a standard agreement that describes the rights of the Libraries in easy-to understand and explicit language. 2.5.3 Flexibility and Enhancement Consideration needs to be given to the terms and conditions around cancellation. This might be cancelling a bundled deal and moving to selected content or moving to outright cancellation or cancellation of linked print products. Models that impose ‘no print cancellation’ clauses or impose limits on the number of titles or financial penalties should be avoided. 2.5.4 Legal issue The following legal issue should be addressed in any licencing agreement which an organisation sign. The consortium should consult with legal authority before any license agreement. The organisation payment liability should commence from the date of the resource is accessed. The provider shall maintain access to the organisation at least one month as grace period before cancel the subscription. The licence agreement should not restrict any legal rights of the organisation or consortium according to the governing laws of the organisation or consortium 3.0 Review of Electronic Resources for Cancellation The electronic resources are not permanently available in the library. The resources are subscribed by various pricing model. The consortium committee or library regularly review the e-resources so that we can avoid the cost wastage and utilise the fund to subscribe new resources. The subscription may be cancelled if Usage statistics are consistently low over a significant period of time. The product is no longer cost-effective The content provided is no longer meeting the needs of  the users. A competitive or better product becomes available. The vendor fails to hold up their end of the agreement and/or provides poor service. A product’s price inflates such that it no longer is considered affordable. The product’s content is found to duplicate content in another database. A new vendor can deliver a superior product, including a more user-friendly search interface, providing greater and more reliable access at a reasonable cost, or meet other key criteria not being met by current database provider. 4.0 Review and Renewal Process The rapid changes in the electronic resources and usage pattern, the library or the consortium frequently review the user need and renew the subscription. So that the organisation continue to get the relevant information for their research needs. The electronic resources subscribed from various publisher by various pricing model. The provider give advance notification to the library about the renewal date at least one month time period to avoid unnecessary anomalies of subscription. 5. Sourcing Digital Contents A digital library is not a single entity. It may have digital contents that are i) acquired in digital formats and stored locally on servers, ii) buy access to e-resources from external sources (electronic publishers); iii) capture contents that are “born digital” or iv) converted from legacy documents. A digital library may also host a portal site providing access to digital collections held elsewhere. The digital constituents of a digital library are shown in Figure 1 and are described below: Fig.1: Digital Constituents of a Digital Library 5.1. Acquisition of Collections available in Digital Formats Availability of CD ROM, and more recently DVD ROM, as a media with high-storage capacity, longitivity and ease of transportation, triggered production of several CD ROM-based information products including several bibliographic databases that were earlier available only through online vendors or as abstracting and indexing services in printed format. Thousands of CD ROM databases are currently available from multitude of CD ROM producers including Silver Platter which alone produces more than 250 CD ROM information products. Moreover, several full-text databases also started appearing in late 1980s and early 1990s launching the beginning of a new digital era.  Some of the important full-text digital collections available on CD ROM include: ADONIS, IEEE / IEE Electronic Library (IEL), ABI/INFO,  UMI’s International Business Database, UMI’s General Reference Periodicals, Espace World, US Patents, etc. CD ROM networking technology is now available for providing web-based simultaneous access to CD ROM databases on the Local Area Network (LAN) as well as on Wide Area Network (WAN).  More evolved technology allows caching of the contents of CD ROMs on to a  server, which, in turn, provides  web-based simultaneous and faster access to the information contents of CD ROMs. The libraries have an option to subscribe to these full-text databases as a part of  their digital library. The Silver Platter’s Electronic Reference Library (ERL) technology facilitates uploading of contents of ERL-compliant CD ROM databases onto the harddisc of an Intranet server, which, in turn, provides integrated access and search of ERL-compliant databases through an Intranet server. Moreover, individual research articles in the ERL-compliant database are linked to their full-text articles using Silver Platter’s Silver Linker. Databases on CD ROM can also be cached on web server and provide access through software like IRIS on the Intranet. Moreover, several publishers allow local hosting or establishing mirror sites of their digital contents. For example, IIT Delhi hosts ACM Dingital Library under the consortial arrangements made by the INDEST-AICTEConsortium. Besides, several publishers allow local hosting of metadata to full-text of backfiles of electronic journals purchased by the libraries. Some of the publishers who offer their backfiles of electronic journals include:  ScienceDirect, Institute ofPhysics, Wiley InterScience, Springer’s Open Journals Archives, Nature, Science, American  Chemical Society, etc. 5.2. Buying Access to External Digital Collections The libraries will not become digital libraries, but will rather acquire access to ever growing digital collections on behalf of their users. Majority of these collections are being made available by external sources like commercial publishers, collections mounted by scholarly societies, resources offered by other institutions, electronic journal sites, etc. The electronic journals have become the largest and fastest growing segment of digital collections for most libraries. There are more than 40,000 electronic journals that are now available in electronic format through the Internet. The Internet has long been a favourite media for experimenting with electronic publishing and delivery.  The technology is now available that allow creation of fully digitized multimedia products and make them accessible through the Internet.  Technological changes, especially the Internet and web technology, continue to attract more and more traditional players to adopt it  as a global way to offer their publications to the international community of scientists and technologists. Most of the important publishers now have their web-based interfaces to offer full-texts of their journals. 5.3. Converting Datasets that are “Born Digital” The libraries or the institutions implementing digital libraries may have datasets that are originally created in digital format. It is important that an institution deals with the increasing flood of materials created and delivered solely in digital format.  Doctoral dissertations submitted to universities and research institutions are undisputedly highly valuable documents that qualify to be an important component of any digital library implementation. Moreover, institutions may have  in-house journal(s), annual reports, technical reports, or other datasets, that may be included in digital collection. Items listed above are invariably composed in one of the word processing programme or in a desk-top publishing package. The documents composed on word processing packages or desktop publishing packages can be converted into HTML, PostScript and PDF using tools like Acrobat 7.0 or Acrobat Exchange.  Online converters are also available through Adobe’s site. HTML, as a de facto language of the web and PDF as a de facto standard for online distribution of electronic information, can be deployed to facilitate  transition from computer processible files to a format accessible on the web.  Publishers are increasingly adopting XML to provide structure and functionality to their publications and to ripe the benefit that XML format offers. XML documents provide benefit of a database management system without being one. Publishers code the accepted submissions in XML in a semi-automated process using assortment of software packages available to them or using custom-made software specially designed for this purpose.  The database of XML documents are used for providing search by authors, keywords, etc. and browse the content pages of journals. Behind the web interface lies a relational database like Oracle that store XML documents.  Search and browse operation on highly structured XML datasets provides dynamically generated web pages (HTML-on-fly). These HTML files provides link to full-text of documents in HTML / PDF / PostScript, most formats are generally generated dynamically from the same XML datasets using pre-defined DTDs. Research institutions and univerities may set-up and maintain their OAI-compliant “institutional repositories” to host theses and dissertations submitted to their institutions / universities and research articles published by their researchers and faculty. These institutions and university may also mandate submission of electronic version of theses, dissertations and research articles. Several OAI-compliant digital library software such as Dspace, e-prints, FEDORA, CDSWare, etc. are available as open source software.  5.4. Conversion of Existing Print Media into Digital Format Several digital library projects are concerned with providing digital access to materials that already exists with traditional libraries in printed media. Scanned page images are practically the only reasonable solution for institutions such as libraries for converting existing paper collection (legacy documents) without having access to the original data in computer processible formats convertible into HTML / XML or in any other structured or unstructured text. Scanned page images are natural choice for large-scale conversions for major digital library initiatives.  Printed text, pictures and figures are transformed into computer-accessible formats using a digital scanner or a digital camera in a process called  document imaging or scanning.  The digitally scanned images are stored in a file as a bit-mapped page image, irrespective of the fact that a scanned page contains a photograph, a line drawing or text.  A bit-mapped page image is a type of computer graphic, literally an electronic picture of the page which can most easily be equated to a facsimile image of the page and as such they can be read by humans, but not by the computers, understably “text” in a page image is not searchable on a computer using the present-day technology.  An image-based implementation require a large space for data storage and transmission.  There are several large projects using page images as their primary storage format, including project JSTOR (www.jstor.org)  at Princeton University funded by the Melon Foundation. The project Jstor has a complete set of more than 800 journals scanned and hosted on web servers that resides at the University of Michigan and is mirrored at Princeton University. Using technology developed at Michigan, high resolution (600 dpi) bit-mapped images of each page are linked to a text file generated with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Linking a searchable text file to the page images of the entire published record of a journal along with newly constructed table of contents, indexes, permits  high level of access, search and retrieval of the journal material previously unimaginable. Capturing page image format is comparatively easy and inexpensive, it is a faithful reproduction of its original document maintaining page integrity and originality. The scanned textual images, however, are not searchable unless it is OCRed, which, in itself, is highly error prone process specially when it involves scientific texts. Options and technology for converting print to digital and the process of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are elaborated in section on “digitisation”. 5.5. Creating Vitual Library, Library Portal or Subject Gateways The web, being a hypermedia-based system, allow linking amongst electronic resources stored on servers dispersed geographically on distant locations. The portal sites or gateways redirect a user to the holders of  the original digital material. It may provide its own indexing and search services and it may combine original resources from a number of different providers. The portal sites or the gateways restrict their operation to providing linkages to independent third-party sources. Home pages of all the major education and  research institutions, specially in developed world, provide an organized and structured guide to electronic resources available on the Internet as well as those available to library hosting the portal site. Librarians can proactively develop subject portals on their library’s web site. 6. Pricing Model One of the major issue that the publishers are concerned with is to save their economic interest in the process of providing electronic access to their printed publications. The publishers make a significant investment in the process of production of a journal which involves activities like peer-review, administration, editing, layout design, production, subscription management and distribution. Most  activities that are performed for publishing  a journal are common to both electronic and paper media, except for production and distribution where the cost involved is relatively low. Moreover, electronic version of journals generally provides additional features like link to corrections, link to additional materials, e-mail link to author(s), etc. which require additional work on part of the publisher. Tenopir and King (1997) in a study concluded that the cost of electronic journals can not be substantially lower than their printed versions. Journals are made available by the publishers through the web at varying price models. In a survey of 8001 peer reviewed electronic journals conducted by EBSCO, it was found that 50% of journals are free with their print journals, 34% require additional payment over their print subscription and 16% are available online only without their print counter-part. Overall, 84% of journals require a print subscription to journals as a prerequisite for online access to their electronic version. (Boteler, 2001). The prevalent pricing models are (Sathyanarayana, 2004) described below: i) Print + E Model Print + electronic model was evolved by the publishers as a natural extension of their print subscription model. The publisher provides electronic access to all subscribed as well as un-subscribed titles or part of un-subscribed titles of a given subject collection on additional payment of certain % on their current print spending. The additional percentage payment may vary from publishers to publisher in the range of 5% and 30%. Libraries are expected to retain their print subscription that existed at the time of signing-up the deal with the publisher. It is obligatory on the part of the libraries to maintain their current level of subscription for the print journals. In a library consortium, a member library in the consortium may have liberty to drop subscription to the journal but should replace it by another journal of same or higher value. Managing this model may pose significant operational problems to both consortia and the publishers. The print + electronic model also provide access to back-files in addition to the current year access. Moreover, depending on the deal, the publisher may also allow cross sharing of subscribed titles across members of the consortium. Archiving rights in such cases are generally limited to titles that are subscribed in print. ii) Electronic Only The e-only models offer electronic access to journals irrespective of their print subscription. Under such offers, publishers offer a pre-defined set of journals of pre-determined cost to libraries. In case of consortium, publishers develop consortium-specific offers taking into account current print spending by the member institutions to ensure that they do not lose of revenue from print cancellations. The proposal is made more attractive by offering discount to those members of consortium who wish to maintain print subscription. Responding to the demands from libraries and library consortia, publishers are moving gradually towards e-only model. E-only models grant consortia-wide archiving and perpetual access rights for the subscribed years’ content. Access and archiving rights for back-file content is offered either as an inclusive value of the offer price or for a one-time additional payment.   iii) Full-Time Equivalent Models Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) models are offered based on population of total number of potential user per site. Generally entire population of the organization including students, faculty, researchers and employees of an organization are counted for FTE. Publishers like Nature and Science who had several multiple subscriptions across the campuses follow this model considering that online access could lead to extinction of their print version over time. iv) Concurrent-Users Model The concurrent user model provides a fix number of concurrent accesses to all the members of consortium treating all members of the consortia as one single entity or site.  The database providers such as, web of Science, use this model predominantly. Universities having multiple sites and national consortium can negotiate this kind of model. v) Perpetual Access V/s Annual Lease The libraries and library consortium are increasingly demanding perpetual access to the contents based on subscription model followed by the libraries in print environment.  However, the cost that is charged for perpetual access, especially by aggregators like Ovid and OCLC is prohibitive. Annual Lease models, on the other hand, offer significant cost advantage.  vi) Back-file Access Access to back-file of journals is a critical necessity especially for scholarly journals. Several leading publishers have embarked on the project of digitising their complete back-files of journals. Several publishers, like Elsevier Science, Springer, ACS and IOP, have already launched their complete journal archives. While several publishers, like ACM and IEEE offer access to their entire back-file collection, as part of the current print subscription, a number of publishers, however, offer free online access to only the current year’s content as part of the print subscription and back-file access is charged separately. Some publishers, who have created back-files from volume 1, offer the back-files on “one-time purchase and perpetual access” basis.  vii) Document Delivery and Pay-Per-View Models Document delivery is an extension of inter-library-lending practice for resource sharing which has been widely practiced world over as exchange of photocopy of articles among libraries. The emerging pay-per-view model, made available by several publishers and third-party aggregators, is likely to replace the old document delivery model. The pay-per-view model charge US$10-50 per article, but offer the benefit of instant access to full-text and is economic advantageous over subscription models. In this model, the library does not subscribe to the complete journal but pays for what is used.  This is an ideal model for the contents of non-subscribed journals. Consortia negotiations can look at the opportunities for using this model for less used journals and engage the publishers for advance purchase of articles for a lower fee per article. Pay-per-view model is driven and promoted by the publishers. It may replace document delivery completely in future.  7.0 Conclusion Collection development in the digital library environment is a complicated task. The library should make the collection development policy based on the mission and objective of the organisation. While selecting the e-resources, the library should be careful considering the depth of the content, authenticity, pricing model, access mechanism, etc. Some of the publishers provide bundled access, such cases the selection committee should be careful about no of journal included in the bundle and authenticity of the journal. The selection committee ensure that, the publisher has advanced the current technology to provide access to participating institution including compatible for federated access management, adopt international standard to provide usage statistics through SUSI protocol and Z39.50 search and retrieval of information from remote server. The library committee should evaluate the usage of the existing collection and consider them to add remove news e-resources to the collection and remove unused and less used resources. Licencing and pricing model differ from each publisher, selection committee should evaluate the various licencing model &  pricing model and formulate the proper policy to access the current e-resources, back volume, concurrent user, print only, print + electronic-model, electronic model, etc.  8.0 References / Readings 1.  Tenopir, Carol, and Donald W. King (1997). Trends in scientific scholarly journal publishing in the United           States. Ontario: Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 28 (April): 135-70. 2. BOTELER (J). An e-mail dated Feb. 28, 2001 to listservDIG_REF@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU 3. Arora, J. (2001) Building Digital Libraries: Data Capture. Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries. DRTC, Bangalore (12th–16th March, 2001). Bangalore: DRTC  4. Satyanarayana, N.V., Krishnan, S. and Arora, J. (2004) Library consortia and resource sharing initiatives in India: A White Paper. Bangalore, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, pp.54. 5. NISO Framework Advisory Group (2004), A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. National Information Standards Organization, 2nd ed., available at: www.niso.org/framework/framework2.html 6. Sharon Johnson, Ole Gunnar Evensen, Julia Gelfand, Glenda Lammers, Lynn Sipe and Nadia Zilper (2012),  Key Issues for e-Resource Collection Development: A Guide for Libraries. Netherlands: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions 7. E-Resources Collection Development Policy. Available athttp://www.lib.colum.edu/about/ecollectiondevelopment.php (Accessed: 15 March 2013) 8. Electronic Resources Collection Development Policy. Available athttp://lib.hku.hk/cd/policies/erp.html (Accessed: 20 March 2013)