The Hindu Business Line : `Digital library, e-learning must complement each other'

LIBRARIANS in digital libraries could become key players in propagating e-learning. Inducting them as teaching members and course content developers and even as technical trouble shooters, can help in evolving a long-term vision for setting up a knowledge society.

As library and librarians are the most enduring and flexible institutions, they could be proactive participants in the evolution of the 21st century education paradigm.

Highlighting the assets of digital libraries, Prof. Andrew Large of Mcgill University, Canada, said digital library and e-learning would have to complement each other. E-learning will be made possible if there are well-equipped classrooms and user-friendly technologies, he said at the Info-vision Summit here recently.

It is important to develop Internet delivery mode and open archives, he said adding with the aid of technology online access learning could become simpler.

Prof. Ingeborg T Solvberg of the Norwegian University of Science said digital libraries and e-learning faced challenges of relating technologies across geographical boundaries and to different communities. However, with current researches focusing on improving user interfaces and tools to generate content, analysing and interacting with complex data, e-learning could become easier.

Referring to the `minimally invasive education' experiment, Mr Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist, NIIT, New Delhi, said a computer connected to the Internet was embedded into a slum wall and left for unsupervised use by children. The experiment suggested that children, irrespective of their social, ethnic or educational identity, could learn to use computers by themselves, thereby closing the `digital divide'.

Infovision, planned as an annual global event, brought the IT and the academia to deliberate on evolving a comprehensive policy framework for information society based on equity of access to technology at a cheaper cost for removing the digital divide.

The two-day summit was organised by the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore and Informatics India Ltd.

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