What Is a Digital Library?
A digital library is a collection of resources, such as books, newspaper articles, images, and videos organized in an electronic format and available online in a centralized database. This means that students and teachers can access the resources using Internet-enabled devices such as tablets and laptops. This way of storing educational texts has a wealth of advantages.
Advantages of a Digital Library
- Choice – Digital libraries provide access to a far greater range of content, as they are not confined by the physical space each book takes up. As digital libraries rely on cloud storage, thousands of documents are available without needing to take up space in any building.
- Access – As long as students or teachers have a device that can go online, resources are available anywhere. Students, therefore, do not need to waste time travelling to and from a physical library, and can instead request the desired document from anywhere.
- Retrieval – Finding and retrieving a learning resource when using a digital library is as easy as searching for it using a database, which can take just seconds. This is preferable over the traditional method of walking up and down the corridors of a real library. Incidentally, if you are crafting a cloud-based system, it may pay dividends to know your IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, and more.
- Preventing deterioration – If a source is available online, it means that its physical self does not need to be endlessly handled and moved. This is especially worth considering with particularly rare or precious texts.
Tips to Build and Manage Your Digital School Library
As we can see, digital libraries have the potential to be a powerful way to assist students to find and use educational texts. However, building and maintaining a digital library can have its challenges. Below are six useful tips to making sure that your digital library is as good as it can be.
1. Multiformat
The greater the resource variety of your library, the more chance you have of engaging students. The magic of a digital library is that it doesn’t only support traditional texts such as books and magazines, but is able to contain and display digital formats such as audiobooks and videos. For some students, reading long articles or large tomes on a subject can prove challenging. They may prefer to learn through listening to an audiobook or via a series of short videos. This means that a more comprehensive selection of students can engage with content and therefore with the learning process.The online nature of a digital library also means that features to communicate within the library’s software can also be developed. This includes CPaaS meaning capabilities such as sending voice and SMSs could be possible within the library app.
2. Resource Accessibility
Making sure that resources are easy to access for students with a range of learning difficulties can increase the overall impact of your library significantly. Thankfully, digital learning resources are more adaptable to specific learning needs than traditional physical resources.
Digital sources have capabilities such as text-to-speech and font enlargement, as well as a host of highlighting and term-searching software. Utilizing these functions can give students who may have in the past struggled with conventional book learning a better chance of interacting with learning materials. Online resources can also help students with social disabilities such as autism. This is because online resources can be accessed from home and therefore do not require students with social challenges to enter a difficult environment, such as a busy library. They can instead attend livestreams or download the content they need online.
3. Out-of-Hours Access
4. Do Not Eliminate Your Print Materials
5. Content Recommendations
6. Appealing Content
By creating your digital library with these tips in mind, you’ll help students become better readers and, ideally, develop greater critical-thinking skills. In addition to the technical proficiencies, the new library should help foster a greater love of reading in students, with more access to the documents they need.
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