VietNamNet Bridge - Gone are the days of traditional libraries which specialize in storing and managing information in papers. In Vietnam, a lot of libraries have been going digitalized.
 
The digitalization revolution in libraries
 
Tran Tat Thanh, Director of the Dong Nai provincial library, said that over the last 30 years, the library has collected and stored thousands of books.
 
The storage and the library management had been carried out manually for many years until 2002, when the library decided to cooperate with Lac Viet, a software company, to use Vebrary--a library management software in its works.
 
Currently, every library at the district level in Dong Nai has a multipurpose service room which allows to access to Internet with one server and 5-15 workstations. All the districts’ library officers have been trained in using the software to manage libraries. Vebrary software allows to cover all the works of the library management, from serving the readers’ document reference, taking stock of documents, balancing the document store and other works.
 
To date, all the libraries in the districts of Dong Nai have finished the restoring of document stores and have put information into Internet for exploitation.
 
According to Thanh, the e-library project has brought big facilities to readers, allowing to expand the scope of searching and collecting documents. Especially, it allows bringing information to residents in rural areas.
 
“The e-library system which connects 15 districts’ libraries allows us to share resources among the libraries of the same system,” Thanh said.
 
“However, we still hope that we can develop the library system to the communes,” he added.
 
In an effort to bring libraries to rural areas, the Dong Nai library is going to cause a big revolution: bringing its library to the clouds.
 
According to Thanh, it would be too costly to install servers in every commune. Therefore, he has decided to choose the “cloud library solution”, i.e there will be only one server for the provincial library, while the province will build up the infrastructure system to have Internet to be connected to communes. As such, the libraries in communes can use the resources of the provincial library just with Internet connection.
 
It is expected by 2015, all the provincial libraries would be computerized with 50-70 percent of precious documents to be digitized, and by 2020, 100 percent of the districts’ libraries would be computerized. At present, libraries in Vietnam are using ILBI software developed by CMC, LIBOL by Tinh Van, Vebrary by Lac Viet and free CDS/ISIS provided by UNESCO.
 
Big challenges ahead
 
The National Library of Vietnam has more than one million books and publications and it gets 11 billion dong every from the state budget to operate. The provincial library system includes 63 units each of which has 15,000 publications and run with the annual budget of 1.8 billion dong. Besides, there are also 4000 communes’ libraries.
 
Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, Director of the Library Department under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said that while the library has been relying on the state budget to operate, the budget has been cut in recent years, so that Vietnam has more money for more urgent tasks, such as the prevention from natural calamities and climate change.

“In order to survive, libraries have to seek support from donors and seek sources of revenue by charging readers. However, the incomes are not big enough for many libraries to exist,” she said.
 
Meanwhile, according to Vinh Quoc Bao from the HCM City national library, the biggest problem is the copyright: libraries have to ask for the permission from authors when making public the digitized versions. To date, the library has just digitized 700,000 book pages of the documents which have expired in copyright protection.
 
Source: TBKTSG