NDLI to collaborate with international libraries

Kolkata :The National Digital Library of India (NDLI), in association with IIT-Kharagpur, is planning to go global through collaborations with top digital libraries of the world.

The NDLI made this announcement at an international workshop, hosted by the UNESCO and the engineering institute, in Delhi last week.The UNESCO has also promised to promote the digital libraries and resource-sharing activities of SAARC countries, an IIT-KGP release said.

"While procuring international content is one aspect, being inclusive and open is also important. The information should be made available in all forms, be it data, technology or content," the press release quoted Professor P P Das, who is the in-charge of NDLI, as having said.

NDLI has been collaborating with Europeana Foundation, an organisation tasked with developing a digital cultural heritage platform for Europe, for the past few months.Some other digital libraries that expressed interest in collaborating with NDLI are Tainacan Project (Brazil), National Library of The Netherlands, National Library of South Africa and National Library of Nepal, the release said.

About 200 domain experts from India and abroad, including representatives from Microsoft Research, Google and Taylor & Francis, participated in the international workshop.The workshop deliberated on the state-of-the-art technology, practices and policies accepted internationally for digital library design.The NDLI project, funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, was kick-started by IIT-KGP with the aim to create a national online educational asset for students interested in research and innovation.

The national library has become a leading digital repository of country with approximately 1.26 crore content resources - thus bringing a significant change in the domain of online content search for both academics and general readership.The portal (https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/) went live about a year back and currently hosts more than 12 million contents in over 100 languages, sourced from about 150 institutes or publishers.