Digital Object Identifier In Effective Media Library Management - An Indian Perspective

There has been a need for identity across generations. It has been in the form of paper, plastic and now digital. Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a concept that helps to identify the needs of the end-users using technology on a digital environment. DOIs can point to documents, images, sounds, video clips, parts of works, gateways, works under development, evolving works, invoice screens (e.g. order forms, invitational membership forms or pay-per-view forms), rights agreements, a page pointing to an object, even constantly changing sources like news headlines or stock quotes. Virtually anything that a URL might point to now could be handled by the DOI system. DOI makes it possible to identify the information on a digital network, and associating it with related current data. DOIs are designed for use in any digital network, not just the World Wide Web, which is only one recent aspect of the evolution of digital networks and the use of digital objects within them. DOIs can be used in open or proprietary digital networks in broadcasting, multimedia systems, or indeed any conceptual framework. DOIs can be thought of as an abstract specification, which have a reference implementation in the current Internet technologies. From a media library point of view, with so much of news flowing in a media organization, one needs to be both subject as well as system expert to identify, organize, store and also retrieve information. Many attempts have been made to organize the newspapers over the years, from bound volumes to the recent full-text newspaper database to identify the news or information. The role of digital identifiers plays a part in some ways. Though DOI may not be used in true sense, information which is collected, stored and retrieved using digital media be it CD-ROMs, tape drives or web based applications are based on certain identification which may be in the form of numbers generated by database themselves or by manual inputs. Therefore, one can easily identify the news item hosted under various categories for either modification or for effective retrieval. Another area that digital media libraries are slowly moving into helping the organization bring out eBooks to enhance, sustain and provide value-added service to their reader/ browser and also bring in some extra revenue for the organization. Therefore, this paper looks at ways effectively to organize media library in managing information, storing, retrieving, indexing, classification and overall management of news flow in a media setup and also sees a need for DOI as a tool to reach to different target audiences and end users.