Digital Library *1 Bharat Kumar Kunjam, Mr. Rahul Kumar Chawda *1 Pursuing MCA Final year, CSE & IT Department, Kalinga University, Atal Nagar, Raipur, CG, India 2 Assistant Professor, HOD, CSE & IT Department, Kalinga University, Atal Nagar, Raipur, CG, India Abstract:- During the past recent years, there has been tremendous development reaming the concept of digital libraries-a knowledge base that can be stored and retrieved through on-line networks. Digital libraries are the most complex form of information systems that support digital document preservation, distributed database management, hypertext, filtering, information retrieval and selective dissemination of information. This has really overcome geographical barrier offering wide range of academic, research and cultural resources with multimedia effects which can be accessed around the world over the distributed networks. The paper examines the concept of Digital library, the technology that has enabled its emergence & architecture of digital library system. It also highlights the digital library projects undertaken in USA, UK and India. Here the authors explored the unique feature of digital library and possible challenges ahead for library and information professionals in the digital environment. Keywords: Digital, E –resources I. INTRODUCTION 1.1 OVERVIEW A Digital library (also referred to as electronic library or digital repository) is a focused collection of digital objects that can include text, visual material, audio material, video material, stored as electronic media formats (as opposed to print, micro form, or other media), along with means for organizing, storing, and retrieving the files and media contained in the library collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals, organizations, or affiliated with established physical library buildings or institutions, or with academic institutions. The electronic content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. An electronic library is a type of information retrieval system. The term digital libraries was first popularized by the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994 (Wikipedia, 2014). In the digital library, information is stored as "digital objects". A primitive idea of a digital object is that it is just a set of bits, but this idea is too simple. The content of even the most basic digital object has some structure, and information, such as intellectual property rights, must be associated with the digital object. Figure 2 shows that a digital object in a repository has two parts, content and associated data, sometimes called "metadata". (William Y. Arms, 1997) Figure 1.1 Parts of a digital object (Chooralil, 2010) To enable the content to represent useful information, its type must be known. Thus part of the content may be of type text (perhaps encoded in a mark-up language), while another part may be of type audio. A single digital object may contain many types of content. It turns out that arbitrarily complex data types can be constructed from a few basic types, notably bit sequences, handles and other digital objects. By combining these in various combinations, any digital content can be represented. To manage valuable intellectual property, certain metadata is required. This is shown in the figure. It always includes a unique identifier (the handle). It may also include properties such as rights and access methods. One property states whether a digital object is mutable, in that it may be altered after being placed in a repository. Another is a digital signature or other method of validating that an object has not been changed. Frequently, it is useful to keep a log of all transactions associated with each digital object. International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) ISSN: 2278-0181 http://www.ijert.org IJERTV9IS080313 (This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.) Published by : www.ijert.org Vol. 9 Issue 08, August-2020 674