Development of Digital Library: Issues, Opportunities and Challenges

Rapid revolutionary advances in Information and Communication Technologies and their immense capabilities such as dramatic decrease in the cost of computers coupled with the tremendous increase in the fast processing power and digital storage media, affordable high bandwidth networks, explosive growth of web based information resources, sophisticated search engines, high resolution capture devices and ever growing electronic publications have made it possible for the development of digital libraries. Digital Libraries build information resources predominantly in digital form. Development of a digital library is expensive and involvers consideration of several issues like technological infrastructure, building digital content, adopting standards and software, copyright policies, user interface etc., The present paper defines the concept of digital library and discusses the various issues, advantages and basic components of digital library.