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Sankar Radhakrishnan

Thiruvananthapuram , Sept. 4

IMAGINE a library that is free, allows readers to access books and manuscripts at any time of the day, on all days of the year and never tells a borrower that the book he or she wants is "out". These are just a few of the features the Digital Library of India will offer visitors.

Likely to be formally inaugurated on September 8 by the President of India Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the library will offer free, 24x7 Internet-based access to people from around the world. A collaborative effort between the Indian Institute of Science and the Carnegie Mellon University in the US, the library is a part of the US-based Universal Library Project. The project has also drawn participation from several Government, religious and academic institutions in India.

The project envisages the digitisation of approximately 1,00,000 books by the end of this year or by early next year. The near-term objective is to have 1 million books in the Digital Library of India by 2008. The intention is to have other forms of communication such as famous speeches, music and so on as part of the digital library by 2020, says Dr N. Balakrishnan, Chairman- Division of Information Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, who is the project's coordinator.

Another aspect of the digital library project is to make it possible to run a search across languages using a term in one's own language and obtain a translation of the relevant portion, he says. This will make it possible for people to have access to knowledge that exists in languages other than their own. So a Telugu speaker will be able to access information in say Hindi or Urdu, by running a search using his own language. However, for this feature to be fully operational, optical character recognition (OCR) software that can operate in languages other than English will have to be developed.

Some 30,000 books and manuscripts in various Indian languages and English have already been digitised as part of the project, says Dr Balakrishnan. While a good proportion of the books that have been digitised so far are in English and Telugu, books in languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu and Kannada have also been scanned.

In some cases, especially in the case of ancient palm leaf manuscripts, only a few people know the dialect, says Dr Balakrishnan. In such instances, audio files of the manuscripts have been prepared to make it easier to refer to such documents, he adds. The library will be at www.dli.gov.in.

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