Digital Information Management within Modern Library Systems, Consortia and e- journals

Abstract

In our modern world of fast changing technology, let us look back for a minute and remember the beginning of communication. Not so long ago, only language was available for interaction and only memory for storage. Few years ago - relatively speaking - the print culture started, first on stone and later on papyrus, that was around 1900 years ago, it was possible to write, to read, to store and to register. Most likely, this helped to promote and spread our culture, literature, philosophy, medical and natural science, but also technical and human mistakes.

Today, one of the interesting questions is, whether the digital information, the new superhighway of fast data transfer will help to develop new values of our society, restore some of the old values, or if the new information will only be used to promote injustice. As long as libraries existed, remember the Alexandra library in old Egypt, they are always centres of information, of study, storage and innovation. Now their role is changing to using modern technology, to the distribution of knowledge via digital data networks and we will discuss some of this new role and its advantages and disadvantages (1–4).

Consortium is one of this modern words, there are consortia for constructions, for banking, of airlines... and for libraries - a larger unit of libraries to coordinate acquisition and to cooperate in many aspects. In this context, the consortium is thought to cooperate for joint access to online material, mainly e-journals. It is thought as a framework for the scientific libraries and allows individual members to participate in contracts with publishers or agents.