PRESIDENT LAUNCHES PORTAL OF DIGITAL
LIBRARY
The President, Dr.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam today launched the Portal of Digital Library
of India. The Portal will have about 27,000 books in a digitised
form. Speaking on the occasion, the President called upon the
people to bridge digital divide. He said that it will contribute
to economic upliftment of the people. Lauding the project, Dr.
Kalam said efforts should be made to digitise our traditional
knowledge. Stressing the need to take knowledge bank to every
nook and corner of the country, the President said that one lakh
books digital library should be available in every college of
the country. Highlighting the positive aspects of a digital library,
Dr. Kalam said it will be useful to everybody irrespective of
economic and social status. They can be in touch with the research
in various fields.
The Minister for
Information Technology, Communications and Disinvestment, Shri
Arun Shourie said that this project will spur to work on technology
leading to economic development. Citing example of the good work
done by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
in the field of traditional knowledge, he said it will help in
patenting and greater use of our traditional knowledge. Mr. Shourie
offered his books for digitisation for the free references by
the readers.
The Professor at
Carnegie Mellon University and the Director of Universal Digital
Library, Dr. Raj Reddy suggested that advantages of Advancement
of Communication Technology should be availed which has increased
the capacity of the bandwidth by 1000 times at 1/10th
of the cost. He also wanted that bandwidth connection should be
provided free to the potential user. Dr. Reddy also suggested
change in patenting and copyright laws to remove barrier for having
a good digital library.
The Information Technology
Secretary, Shri K.K. Jaswal reminded the audience that this project
at the initial stages was encouraged by the President himself
when he was the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government.
The Digital Libraries
are a form of Information Technology in which users can effectively
search within the interspace of a billion repositories. The basic
goal of digital library is to digitise and index the heritage
knowledge and to provide a test bed that will support other research
areas. It will also help in creating a knowledge based society
and have collaborative relationship with other such projects.
It is a part of the Universal Digital Library Project which aims
at creating a free to read, searchable collection of 1 million
books by 2005 and making available to everyone over the internet.
