A modern library is not only a repository for books, but also a kind of electronic archive, a place where you can access information both on traditional media and in electronic form. It is a social institution whose activities are aimed at ensuring equal access to information, in the context of the development of the processes of humanization of education, its informatization, openness and formation of educational information needs, which is able to provide high-quality technological, social and educational access to information.
Often, a researcher receives the necessary information in the library, as it is an “intellectual intermediary” between a person and information. The significance and role of information is that, first, no scientific research is possible without it; second, all information has the ability to quickly become obsolete, so it needs to be constantly updated.
Today, almost every library is equipped with the Internet, which makes it easier to find the information you need. For readers who come to the library, this is complemented by the function of providing access to external resources that exist in electronic form,
Although the library is by its nature one of the bearers of conservative values, it has no right to refuse the Internet. But at the same time, it cannot indiscriminately accept all of its resources and all of its “rules of the game.” The library must carefully change the traditions of classifying information search, storage, and consumption. Therefore, it cannot trust the Internet as it is. Rather, it should take advantage of its capabilities, which do not so much abolish the usual forms of finding and processing information as improve and simplify them.
Digital libraries can be called libraries of the XXI century, which are a kind of network that connects them with the outside world through the latest electronic technologies. Digital libraries differ from traditional libraries in that they use the electronic format of publications and provide access to a remote resource through telecommunication technologies. These are repositories of electronic documents equipped with the necessary mechanisms for accessing and working with them.
It is not enough for a modern library worker to know where and on which shelf a particular book or journal is located in its repository; he or she also needs to know on which virtual shelf this book is located in the global distributed space.
As the latest information technologies are actively entering our lives, “virtual libraries” have emerged – a public network distributed in the telecommunications space, focused on data exchange between libraries. Documents in a virtual library are stored in machine-readable form. A user who accesses search engines on the global network can retrieve them without necessarily being a library reader.
