Traditional library or digital library? An era of online data centers!
In the past, all scientists and people used to go to library as a routine activity to gain knowledge from any culture, to discover nature or just to find what they wanted. But at present, everything has been significantly changing basing on the development of World Wide Web. Internet was born and has affected on the aspects of human’s life. What are the differences here or just it is revolution of publishing?
In traditional library, you could find the invaluable information from the first generations who collected, reserved, and made them in order for the future generation. In general, a library is often described in a high building with many massive shelves including many kinds of books, data, journals. When you come and go around a library, that means you have a interesting travel through spatial and temporal, from the starting point of knowledge to present. The system of libraries placed around the world is a invaluable treasure of human being. However, some existence reduce partly in its role. The most striking is lacking connection, you only find the information or data about a certain field in certain library or these data of a country is recorded and protected in this nation. Secondly, it is difficulty to seek a small information inside a great amount of database by walking from this shelf to another, from the region to others. Time, last but not least is the main destroyed factor that many countries have been facing to reserved the data they had. Is there, hence, any version of library could recover all disadvantages?
As a sequence, the presence of online data centers is the answer to tackle all problems of traditional library. Nowadays, researchers have a tendency on seeking internet and just by tapping fingers, the whole data world will appear. There are a variety of international, intergovernmental and funding agencies have set up a guidance to make data available such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the European Research Council, UK Research Councils, and the US National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health and many others for you to choose. Internet bring all scientists over the world to one place in order to work, communicate and research. Specially, at present, there are a lot of globalization issues that can not be responsible for any country such as climate change, disease, pollutions. Connection is more and more important to set up a global strategy.
When internet and scientists come together, they will produce the data centers. It is slightly luckily nowadays information derive from many sources and up-date day by day under researches have been performing is usually aggregated and add significant value to data sets through quality control procedures, ensuring adequate metadata, and providing online tools to explore, visualize (e.g., maps, graphs), and download the data in formats suitable for further research (Arzberger, P., 2004) Researchers will be able to process massive amounts of complex and up-date data much more quickly, 750 visitors unique IP addressed view more than 20 million pagers just one month (Doug Howe, Seung Yon Rhee et al., 2008). Even if you are a amateur but like doing scientist or just interest in one special species, such as frog, butterfly.., it is slightly easier for you to search, find and ask some questions from, your view. Moreover, younger scientists or student, who do not have much money, have more opportunities to touch these new methods, news trends of science and contribute their research in global. Instead of licenses, “publication” is simpler conceptually and practically and responsibility for use of the data more clearly lies with the reader.
Besides, the scientists get many benefits from online database. One of these is the expense: with online publication is less expensive and its exposes the author’s work to far wider audience and the cost of saving and reusing data published online is also likely to be lower than the cost of collecting them again. The second is about scientific activities, in which making data availability mandatory may help discourage and expose scientific misconduct and such data are inevitably a sample of what could be collected at different spatial scales and overtime. To identify a good hypothesis is the third advantages, the investigators collects only the data that are relevant to the original hypothesis and when new information cause the original hypothesis to change, they must plan a new experiment from scratch.
From these points, how can motivate online publication of date to build a digital library? There are five different management domains that have an influence on data access, including technological, institutional and managerial, financial and budgetary, legal and policy and behavioral consideration. There is no single model for how data access should take place. The implementation of the core principle of open availability, however, requires a systematic approach that recognize the necessity of implementing improvements across interdependent management domains (Arzberger, P., 2004). In some countries, the government endorsed a declaration based on the principle that research data from public funding should be openly available. In addition, they also have a policies calling on countries or grant recipients to make data available and made connection all over the world. In fact, there are many difficulties in transferring from the print-on-paper to electronic publishing such as intellectual property rights (IPRs), citation of a paper. However, in a revolution, there are always a conflict between the old, preconception, and the new by surmounting obstacles.
In conclusion, the development of digital library through building online data centers and being incentive online publication of data has been increasing sharply. However, there is a co-existence between traditional and the digital one.We could not deny the role of books and journal in the present life, many people and scientists still keen on reading books when they are in bed. Although this, print media is the future of publishing science