Edu-leaders

When Google launched its agreement with publishers and authors regarding the digitising of books and making them available over the web, the company’s co-founder and president of technology, Sergey Brin said: “Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their (readers’) fingertips.”

This could well be your vision for your students. To give them access to all the knowledge in the books that your library stocks, and those that other libraries do. Often, when a student needs to find the book he is looking for, he finds that all copies have been lent out to other students. Various departments might want to secure subscriptions to the same prestigious journal. These books and journals are obtained with considerable effort. But when the library runs out of space, the old journals and magazines are simply junked. Either an institution lives with it, or decides to opt for a digital library. Simply put, a digital library stores its collections of books, journals, dissertations, and magazines in a digital format. Instead of allowing precious real estate to be converted into “physical libraries”, storage servers share books and journals at the click of a mouse. This enables students to gain access to the knowledge repository via computers.

“A digital library is the need of the hour. The students and faculty demand that kind of access now,” says Dr MG Sreekumar, librarian and head, Center for Development of Digital Libraries (CDDL), Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM K). He is also the UNESCO co-ordinator Greenstone Support for South Asia.

So does that mean traditional libraries are out? “No, we are of the firm belief that traditional libraries are to be respected. We should look at digital libraries as a layer added above the traditional libraries. That’s when the real value addition happens to the existing knowledge in the organisation,” he says. There are no physical books to rummage through. Every digital object in a digital library, whether a book, or a video, or a journal, is tagged using metadata. Metadata are keywords and descriptors that describe each item in the collection. Information managers in a digital library make this metadata highly descriptive, so that anybody using the digital library can easily zero in on the item he is looking for by running a search.

Inside A Digital Library
So what all can a digital library contain? Dr S. Ashok, chairman, Education Technology and Library, Network of Automated Library And Archives (Nalanda), National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NITC) says, “Nalanda has e-books, e-journals, e-databases, back volume collections of journals, student theses, faculty course materials, application notes, data sheets, and e-learning courses, conference proceedings, dissertations and CBTs.”

The Digital Library of India project, which is hosted by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in cooperation with many institutions, for the Centre, aims to digitise one million books, mostly in Indian languages. Dr N. Balakrishnan, Chairman of Division of Information Sciences, IISc says, “We have digitised over 203,842 books from various libraries across India. We have books and journals in diverse subjects along with newspapers and manuscripts.”

Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM K), has e-books, e-journals, videos, and a repository of its own publications which include conference proceedings, working papers and student publications.

Digital Plusses
“Things have been completely turned on their head now. Take publishing for instance. Fifteen years ago, a book was printed and then it would be converted into the digital form. Now the book takes birth in the electronic form and then if required, it is printed. Another example is the library. Earlier you would visit the library. Now the library is made available to you,” says Sreekumar of IIM K. This implies access to a library that is not limited by timings. It is available round the clock as long as the connectivity to the library is maintained. Concerns regarding real estate and storage of books, magazines and journals are eliminated. Libraries don’t have to worry about maintaining multiple copies of a same book. In a 2004 paper by the Centre for Knowledge Societies developed for Educational Development Centre, authors Aditya Dev Sood and Uma Chandrasekharan, say, “Although conventional libraries do preserve socio-cultural ambiences within their spaces, a digital library can provide more equitable and widely distributed access at lower costs.”

As already mentioned, many libraries take on the task of digitising existing rare manuscripts and old books. If such fragile objects are given public access they would soon be unusable. Converting them into digital formats ensures that this does not happen, and that all those who need to read them get access to their digital versions. Digital libraries are not limited to printed material. Knowledge can be contained in any form, such as audio recordings, videos, graphics, images, even e-mail. All these can be brought to users.

This also means that users now have a choice of how they want to carry that data. Digital libraries can enable printing of information, or allow copying through various media. Once an institution sets up a digital library using open interoperability standards, it can connect to digital libraries across the world. This throws open knowledge residing in any server anywhere on the planet. It completely and absolutely simplifies knowledge sharing, and makes the entire process of seeking knowledge seamless.

Start The Scans
This does not mean that institutions should start scanning the books it has, once it decides to embark on the digital library journey. Do remember that you have purchased a book, not its copyright. So, making it available in a digital form for public use might mean that you are violating copyright laws.

Understanding what can go and cannot go into the digital library is the first step. Out of copyright material can be included, but not those still in copyright, in-print, and out-of-print material. For the latter set, you have to get the permissions from publishers. You could end up getting rights permissions which allow usage of material in certain ways, which could be different for different publishers and material. Your digital library software should be able to handle these disparate ways of managing the rights. “You cannot touch anything that is under copyright,” says Dr Jagdish Arora, Director, INFLIBNET Centre, an inter-university centre of University Grants Commission (UGC).

Sreekumar agrees. “It is not advisable to digitise anything under copyright. Take the legal route and approach the publishers for permission,” he says.

This does not mean that your digital library will end up with a precious few books. The books you already have can be made available to your students by approaching the publisher. The publisher could have options to provide e-books against a certain payment.

You could also negotiate a deal in which you can make parts of the book, or an entire copy, available to users. For instance, a book which does not seem to have a presence in your region, may find a new market if you make it digitally available to students and faculty in your institution. Such actions would also please the publisher.

Numerous books are available in the public domain. According to reports, in November 2008, Googles Books Library Project had touched the 7-million mark, of which 5 million were out of copyright. Project Gutenberg has over 30,000 free e-books on its site.

A trend that will define digital libraries in the coming years is the changing attitude of authors making their content open to public.

The Open Access Initiative which encourages free and unrestricted online availability of material, says, “Open access is economically feasible, as it gives readers the power to find and use relevant literature. It gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.”

The Open Access Initiative encourages institutions and authors to make their works accessible to all. There is a definite effort to have open access journals which will enable authors to give the public easy access to their work. Digital libraries that meet the standards of the Open Archives Initiative enable self archiving, which allows authors to submit their works to electronic libraries. These efforts can enable open access to works by scholars and researchers. This is not just limited to written works. Says Sreekumar, “We already have lots of authenticated videos from institutions such as MIT Open Courseware and IIT.”

What’s The Strategy?

A digital library has two parts to it—external and internal. The internal consists of all content that is generated within the institution. The external consists of all links to outside content. Internal content refers to the research papers and course material, while the external content refers to links to any number of journals, and other content which needs to be procured from outside the library.

What should be the balance between the two? Sreekumar opines that there should be sizeable knowledge within the institution before it can go into the digital library.

He also advises developing a strategy to collect all this knowledge which is scattered, disparate and distributed. The other key aspect is money.“You need at least Rs 100,000 to 500.000 to get your digital library off the ground, depending on the volume of knowledge. A sustained investment is also required. So institutions should be geared up for that,” says Sreekumar.

Institutions should be ready to treat it as an ongoing process and give it continuous support. Digital libraries ride on technology. Faced with the reality of technology obsolescence, an institution has to invest to ensure that the digital library is available despite any change in hardware, software and format.

For hardware, you need to look at reliable servers with 3-5 TB of space, SCSI and RAID capabilities depending on what an institution’s requirements are. You need UPSes to ensure the servers are up and running round the clock. Power and cooling costs have to be factored in as well. If your institution intends to get into a lot of scanning, you could opt for high-end scanners. The other option for this is to outsource the scanning. “This costs Rs 5 per page,” says Arora. “You would also need software and other resources to ensure that the scanning is not error-ridden.”

“The other time consuming process is the assignment of metadata. This is what can make your digital library useful. The more descriptive metadata you can have, the more levels at which this description can be done, and the better your indexing will be. This leads to better search results and retrieval.”

Core Of The Library
The digital library software is the core of the solution. “You can opt for commercial software which could easily cost well over Rs 200,000 or opt for free open source repositories such as Greenstone, Dspace, or Eprints. To customise them for your institution, you could opt for outsourcing parts of it to a vendor, and train your library team to handle the rest,” says Sreekumar. When opting for digital library software, what should one keep in mind?

“The ability to integrate all types of media is one. We also look for the interface, and the environment it works in. For instance, does it run on web technologies?
Everything is online, so it has to support web standards,” says Sreekumar. In other words, one has to look at how easy it is to make the knowledge easily and seamlessly accessible to the end user.

An institution should also look for interoperability standards. This will help its digital library collaborate with other digital libraries of the world. So it needs to primarily support OAI-PMH (Open Access Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). Echoing this thought, Arora says, “The software has to meet international standards.”

Talking about Dspace, Venkatesh L.S., Director, Ecole Global, says, “DSpace is an open source digital repository solution that helps librarians implement a standards-based system. There are other commercially available software but libraries prefer DSpace as it complies with the key international standards for digital archives.”

It is easy to implement and is also customisable. It can be integrated with existing enterprise systems such as a library management system. The key standards supported by DSpace include CNRI Handles, a technology specification to assign unique handles to each digital object which helps in easy retrieval; and OAI-PMH v2.0 which allows digital libraries to collect metadata, index them and provide better search results.

According to Sreekumar, Greenstone is a renowned open source software system sponsored by UNESCO. One of the laudable efforts of Greenstone is its commitment to lower the bar for construction of practical digital libraries, while leaving a lot of flexibility for the user. Greenstone is being used by institutions across the world and the feedback is encouraging.

Preservation Is Critical
Digital storage is highly perishable and you can lose data not just to bad weather or wear and tear, but also to an inadvertent click of a delete button. “You need to have multiple copies, proper backup and storage in place so that all your data is always around,” warns Arora. The other issue in preservation is obsolescence of technology.

You need hardware refreshes and software upgrades every few years. Moreover, you have to be prepared to deal with the various format changes.

Manage Rights

It is also important to control who has access to what material in your digital library and you should find a way of managing access rights. There are solutions that can help you solve this issue as well. For instance DSpace has the provision to define access roles and depending on the roles, restriction to different areas of the library can be governed. Users who upload their digital assets are asked to grant a license which would enable other users to download their content. Provision to just view abstracts but non-use of full material can be provided for different items.

The Right People
The key challenge for institutions embarking on a digitising project is related to people. Librarians run libraries, but they are not software experts, while software experts cannot run libraries. “We need professionals who understand the science of running libraries as well as understand software, and that is a big challenge,” says Ashok of NITC.

Institutions should be on the lookout for programmes for library professionals to be trained in digital library software. Current efforts to promote digitisation are encouraging.

UGC’s efforts in running INFLIBNET, the launch of new initiatives such as N-LIST (National Library and Information Services for Scholarly Content) which provide access to online journals to government aided institutions, INDEST (Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Sciences and Technology) Consortium which enable subscriptions to electronic resources for government institutions are some of the ways the Ministry of Human Resources Development is involved in pushing the idea of digital libraries. With this kind of effort and support, we will hopefully see more institutions coming up with digital library initiatives.