Role of Public Libraries in bridging the Digital Divide

The join States National Telecommunications and Information Administration popularized the term digital Divide in the mid 1990s to indicate the societal split between those had and those who did non father annoy to calculating machines and the Internet (Warchauer, 2003). With the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) gyration sweeping across the world, the term has since caught the imagination of societal scientists, administrators, media-persons, economists and politicians alike.They ca-ca see it in turn as a tender, economic and political bother from their respective perspectives, and sought to offer a variety of solutions to bridge the digital Divide. ICT was initially heralded as a great equalizer. The general archetype was that by providing interconnectivity and access to education to all, ICT would provide equal opportunities, and therefore slim inequalities.But it was soon clear that the Mathew Effect of Merton (1973) could come into play and increase t he inequalities plane more by translating the initial advantages of those who gained early access to computers and the Internet into increase returns over time i. e. by widening the digital Divide. The Social and fellowship Context The basic problem however lies in defining Digital Divide. According to Mark (2003) any attempt to bridge the Digital Divide without consideration of the social context could lead to failures and frustrations.He cites a despatch undertaken by the Municipal Government of overbold Delhi in India through which computer kiosks with dial-up Internet connectivity were set up for the urban poor children in New Delhi. According to the policy of minimal invasive education adopted in the brook, there were no teachers or instructors to guide the children in computer usage. The project could not achieve much beyond children learning to play games and expenditure simple applications to paint and draws.On the other hand, The Gyandoot Project in rural atomic numb er 18as of the severalize of Madhya Pradesh in India achieved success because of its companionship orientation. In this case, the use of computers fulfilled social and community needs. The role of public libraries in providing access to computers and the Internet overly has to take all these factors into consideration. The responsibility of public libraries does not end with the preparedness of the equipment for computer and Internet access.Public libraries have to take on the role of the pedagog and the instructor so that exploiters are cap equal to utilize the ICT services efficiently and effectively. The larger orientation of all such services has to be round the fulfillment of social and community requirements in line with the ideals of social and community informatics. The Five Components of Individual Access The concept of Digital Inequality as defined by Hargittai (2003) identifies Technical Means, Autonomy of Use, Social Support Network, merchandise of Content Acces s and Political Access as the five components of single access.Public libraries therefore have to concentrate on providing all the five components to the individual. This would point that libraries provide state-of-the-art equipment so that users are in no federal agency limited or restricted by the state of the facility itself. Ensuring self-reliance of use would suggest providing convenient access to a wide array of users taking into consideration the different timings that could be convenient to different categories of users. This could level entail public libraries offering round-the-clock access to their users.Public libraries impart have to play an active part in building up social support networks for their users. This bequeath not only help the users in select up Internet usage skills faster but allow for alike bring in unseasoned users into the network. Content is a very full of life issue that determines the quality of online access of any user. Any effort to constrain digital inequality will have to ensure that the user is able to locate relevant information on the net. Hargittai (2003) differentiates between available information and accessible information.The available information may not be slowly accessible. The phenomenon of information gatekeepers in the form of search engines and other indexing and trenchant mechanisms adds complexity to the situation. Commercial interests on the Internet more often than not lead the unwary browser away from relevant sources of information. Public libraries will have to take on the added responsibility coaching the novice user in looking for and locating relevant information.Each library will similarly have to ensure that they adopt an indexing and searching mechanism relate with their digital subscriptions so that users can find information customized to their requirements. Public libraries will also have to play their part in ensuring that users have access to the institutions that regulat e the technologies that they are using so that they are also able to participate in policy formulations and decision-making exercises. ConclusionThe role of librarians and library staff will have to undergo vast changes in order to fit into the new responsibilities. Foster (2000) opines that the underlying concerns surrounding the issue of the digital divide are actually more about(predicate) the nature and future of education than about the current distribution patterns of technology. Librarians and library staff will thus have to don the mantle of technical educators and social activists to contribute meaningfully to the drop-off of the Digital Divide.