Digital Libraries, Storage, and More

Computers, along with the Internet and the world wide web, have truly revolutionized the storage and transfer of information. It is important to remember, however, that these changes bring both positives and negatives.

For instance, consider the very design of web pages and they have changed over the years. Early web pages were very simple, containing few images and consisting mostly of text. Today’s websites have animations, photos, videos, sophisticated layouts, etc. Obviously, the multimedia enhanced web of today is more pleasing to the eye and the visual information contained in websites today can certainly be useful, but does it help with the transmission or understanding of information? That is debatable. It could easily be debated that many websites these days bury the truly useful information in their fancy layout, whereas the older sites tended to be simpler to navigate and much more direct in their presentation.

Another topic to consider is how digital libraries and databases are bringing new ways to store and access information. They are not replacing traditional methods, just bringing alternatives. Computer databases can store amounts of information that would be prohibitive in physical form and make it easily accessible to many people over the Internet. The same is true of digital libraries. They can store many books in a form that anybody with an Internet connection can access any time they want.

These solutions are not perfect, however. There is no guarantee they will be around for a great length of time and this seriously affects their potential use as a method of preservation. If the company holding the computers disappears and doesn’t hand the data over to someone else, that information is gone. The end result is users may not be able to rely on Internet-based information methods as much as they would more traditional methods.

Obviously no method of information storage is perfect, and these new technological methods are no exception. It is important to take into account both sides of what they bring to the information landscape.