Ever since Covid-19 has put a restriction on social gatherings, certain sectors of society are finding it hard to continue their services in a regular manner. To save their businesses, a lot of companies shifted their services from traditional to digital platforms. People can access every service online without having to get out of their houses. Even in the education sector, eLearning has taken over traditional classroom learning. Schools and colleges are forced to facilitate eLearning to all their students. eLearning’s benefits are being recognized to be more than traditional learning methods. Established in the ’90s, eLearning has many innovations over the past year. There have been developments in the education technology aimed to create enhanced eLearning experiences.
According to UNESCO,
“In India, the relatively young National Digital Library of India (NDLI) – headquartered at IIT Kharagpur – has established itself the country’s largest online learning platform. A premier gateway to over 48 million e-books and knowledge products across disciplines, it has nearly 3 million regular users today.”
Major universities are using eLearning platforms to manage courses with efficiency. Amongst the other innovations, one of the most used systems is Digital Library. Schools and universities are adopting a digital library for their students. There are multiple digital library benefits for Universities that make it better than the traditional physical library. Before getting into the benefits of digital libraries for Universities, let us look at the definition of a digital library.
What is a Digital Library?
According to Wikipedia,
“A digital library, digital repository, or digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats.”
A Digital Library offers much more than a physical library. Apart from informative content in the form of eBooks, videos, and audio, it also offers an engaging gamified format to encourage users to use the platform. Universities use these libraries to provide electronic formats of books that can be easily accessed by the students and teachers by logging into an online portal. This system allows the uploading and updating of any content. These documents can be accessed seamlessly from any device and can be shared amongst the users. This enables access to a repository of knowledgeable content about anything and everything just by searching on the system.
Digital Library Benefits for Universities
Quick Access to Information
A digital library helps in saving time searching for particular content. Students and teachers can search for content on any topic by just using the search feature. A digital library provides quick access to any information. The system provides a huge repository to save large amounts of content and make it available to all users.
Engaging Content
Students will only use study material if they find it interesting. A digital library provides an attractive and interesting content format so that the students engage in learning. The more interesting the content is, the more users will use the system. The multimedia format with quick access gives students an easy way to get information urgently.
Centralized Content Storage
A digital library offers seamless storage space for storing content. Administrators can easily upload and delete content whenever required as all data is stored in one place. This makes it easier for multiple admins to monitor all the content on the system. The admins can also provide categories and subcategories according to the subjects.
Preservation of Antique Content
There are a lot of books, newspaper clippings, magazines. etc. that are old and need to be preserved. A digital library has to invest in the maintenance of all the antique data and preserve it carefully without damaging it. A digital library saves all the content in a digital format avoiding the risk of it being damaged or having to invest money in maintenance.
Seamless Knowledge
You will find content from multiple sources in a Digital Library. Students can find a lot of different information from various publications by just clicking the search button. The cloud-based digital libraries offer an expansion of storage with an extensive repository.
Track Content Performance
A digital library offers much more than just information. It helps the admin track the performance of all users along with the effectiveness of the material. The admins can improvise the content based on these performance reports. This helps in providing a high-quality learning experience for the users.
Gamified learning experience
One of the major digital libraries benefits for universities is that it has gained popularity is gamified learning. This helps in encouraging users to utilize the content on the platform by awarding them with coins and badges. There is also a leader board which is a display of which user has the maximum points and badges. The universities can award students with a prize for being on the top of the leader board to create healthy competition.
Personalized Recommendations
A lot of digital libraries are providing personalized recommendations by optimizing the library. This helps the user to look at the suggested content based on their activity on the system. This saves a lot of time in searching content as the recommendations are based on the interests of the user.
Conclusion
Digital Libraries have the perfect solution to assist students with their studies, especially during the pandemic. This system has many features that can make give them access to a library at any time and from anywhere. Students don’t have to travel all the way to the university to access the library. This system is rapidly developing to reach perfection with the latest features coming up every year. This is the future of education along with other technologies.
There are many Digital Libraries in the market, one of the best is by Mintbook. We offer the best features to make learning easy. Paired with our LMS, our Digital Library can give the best learning solution for effective education. Mint book’s Digital Library along with its LMS, online examination software, and Virtual Classroom is a full package that can automate learning processes out of the classroom.
