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In a progressively digitalized world with ever-advancing systems of information management, the rows of bound volumes stacked on library shelves could soon make way for virtual three-dimensional books that could be used by multiple readers at once.

The Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) is developing a digital library to host these books, whose pages can be flipped with a swipe of the mouse, in the process simplifying the conventional library cataloging system and making books more accessible to readers.

“Gone will be the days when books are only accessible locally at a certain library and by a single reader at a given time,” Hendro Subagyo, one of the e-library system developers at LIPI’s Center for Documentation and Scientific Information, said on Tuesday.

“With this e-library system we’re developing, those books will be accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection.”

The system, he said, would allow simultaneous access for a single copy by multiple users, however many the client’s server could support.

“If the server is able to support 100 accesses of a single digital file of a book at the same time, then it should be no problem,” Hendro said.

The main stumbling block to transforming conventional books into digitized 3D form, he said, was the issue of copyright, under which a book’s contents may not be reproduced or scanned in any electronic form for commercial purposes.

“We started the e-library system by scanning books for which LIPI holds the copyrights and we will continue to digitize other LIPI research literature,” Hendro said.

Beni Rio Hermanto, from the Bandung Institute of Technology’s (ITB) knowledge management research group, agreed that digitizing books and scientific papers would make them more widely accessible. The university has developed its own platform for digitizing documents.

“We have up to 5,000 users a day accessing our digital library,” he said.

The high rate of use, Beni said, could be attributed to the university’s having already digitized around 30,000 scientific papers, theses and dissertations produced by students, making them available online.

Hendro said LIPI’s work on the e-library content management system, under way for the past year, was making progress.

The process begins with scanning pages from a book or paper into a 3D digital form, and then separating the images from the text. The information is then indexed by subject and keyword, which helps refine the content search and increases the accuracy of search results.

Once the process is done, the digitized book is ready to be uploaded and made available to individual clients’ online users.

LIPI’s e-library framework is already in use by the Ministry of Research and Technology at the national level, Hendro said. At the regional level, the Pekalongan municipal administration in Central Java has expressed interest in adopting the system.

Pekalongan Mayor Mohamad Basyir Ahmad said the digital library would be accessible through telecommunication centers in the around 300 community units across the city by 2015.

He said the initial content would be 35 publications for which the city holds copyrights.

Putut Irwan Pudjiono, the former head of LIPI’s documentation center, said the e-library application framework would eventually form the basis for a centralized digital national database on the country’s diverse genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore, much of which remains undocumented and is at risk of dying out.

“We’re lagging behind when it comes to archiving our traditional assets and a digital system would improve with data keeping,” he said.

LIPI, he said, would start by compiling all the data on genetic resources now available on the institute’s many data centers that have been developed by individual researchers.

“When a researcher retires, the data is left without anyone to continue managing it. In that form, it’s not yet considered a national asset,” Irwan said.

By compiling it into the centralized system, the data would become accessible to various government agencies for further research and development.

“This would be useful to protect and safeguard our national genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore in case other parties or countries lay claim to them,” Irwan said.