Creating a National Digital Library Network: Opportunities and Challenges

Dr. Mohammad Javad Dehghani, the President of Institute for Science Citation (ISC), delivered a speech at Iran Academic Libraries Conference 2021 held jointly by Persian Gulf University and Sharif University of Technology on November 17.

In this conference, which was allocated to the directors and deputies of university libraries, Dr. Mohammad Javad Dehghani spoke on "Creating a National Digital Library Network: Opportunities and Challenges."

The conference themes included ways to overcome the challenges raised in Central University Libraries pre-conference, the mission of central university libraries in the new century by relying on the digital library and creating a sustainable communication network between university libraries.

Dehghani said: "One of the prerequisites for national development in today's era is the better and shared use of information assets of a country, and this can not be achieved except by trying to create some kind of individual, organizational (managerial and policy), intelligence integration." , Data, hardware and software. This kind of synergy marked the beginning of a new platform for joint activities based on the information industry in the world, known as the network.

He added: "Accordingly, one of the priorities of the country's scientific system is to pay attention to this important issue. Despite some initial work on library information and research information networking in Iran, studies show that these networks have not been successful due to some issues, the most important of which is managerial instability, contrary to a very comprehensive and multifaceted plan.”

He then addressed some problems and added: "Among the existing problems there can be mentined the lack of mechanisms and regulations and comprehensive agreements in this regard, low consensus among research and library directors, information confinement culture, lack of paying enough attention to the individual libraries and research assets of each university, ignoring the legal rights of libraries and universities, dominating the software view and creating a monopoly on the use of a particular software, lack of technical, and semantic interoperability.

He continued his speech by stating the main purpose of creating a university library network and said: “networking the information available in university libraries in order to share the data and information resources of all libraries and users (professors, students and staff).

In the end, Dehghani presented the structure of the proposed system to the participants in the conference, which is in four stages and said: “In the first stage, review and feasibility and selecting several regional centers from different parts of the country as a pilot to create a library network, where in the second stage, creating a library network consisting of a limited number of selected branches (at least three branches) and in the third stage, reviewing and evaluating the level of performance and service satisfaction of the network and finally in the fourth stage, gradual network development with connection to other central libraries of universities has been advised.