The Role of Digital Libraries in Sustaining Access to Information in Context to Indian Government Publications

Abstract

A Digital Library is a set of services and technologies that provide the means to collect, manage,
access, disseminate, and preserve digital materials produced in any digital format. Digital
Library disseminates rich source of digitized materials drafted and published by any organization
or individual. While most digital libraries are based at educational institutions like colleges and
universities, they also exist in the governmental agencies, museums, corporations and other
organizations. In India major R& D institutes and Academic Institutes provide Digital Library
service to its clientele. This technology offers organizations and researchers to deposit their work
which facilitates the target audience to access the publications via digital form. Digital Libraries
are becoming an increasingly important type of special resource and service offered by any
institute. The essence of Digital Library is to make publications to be freely available on internet.
This initiative was directed to have an increased visibility of the published documents; further
this will generate good deal of enthusiasm in users.
The content of a Digital Library may include many different types of resources: published books
and journal articles, dissertations, other types of academic publications, and various types of
unpublished articles, such as journal preprints, technical reports, research progress reports,
courseware, and other gray literature audio and video recordings in born digital and digitized
manner. The sharing of knowledge may lead to further development in the same discipline or
related disciplines. Digital Library is now becoming a platform for the sharing of knowledge.