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Type of site | Education |
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Available in | 12 Search Languages languages |
Headquarters | IIT Kharagpur, WB, India, , |
Country of origin | India |
Key people | Dr. B. Sutradhar, Jt. PI of NDLI, Librarian of Central Library, IIT Kharagpur |
Employees | >92 (January 2023) |
URL | www |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Free |
Users | ![]() |
Launched | 19 June 2018 |
Current status | Active |
Content license | CC0 |
The National Digital Library of India is a virtual repository of learning resources, providing services including textbooks, articles, videos, audiobooks, lectures, simulations, fiction, and other kinds of learning media for the learners/user community. It is a project managed by the Ministry of Education, Government of India through its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT). The objective of the project is to collect and collate metadata and provide full text index from several national and international digital libraries, as well as other relevant sources. The NDLI provides free of cost access to many books and designed to hold content of any languages and provides search support for the 12 most widely used Indian languages. It is developed, operated, and maintained by the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. [1]
NDLI offers access to educational materials across various disciplines and academic levels. It aggregates content from numerous national and international sources, including books, articles, theses, audio-video lectures, and OERs. The platform supports multiple languages, and ensures resources are available to those who wish to access them. Built using open architecture, open-source software & open metadata, NDLI currently provides access to more than 100 million items, in 39 Indian languages, out of 423 languages in total.[ citation needed ]
The development of a digital library portal was initiated as a Pilot project (NDLI Ph-I) in April 2015. NDLI Ph-I lasted till 30 September 2017. The initial duration of Ph-II was from 1 October 2017 to 31 March 2020 but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this phase was extended till 31 March 2021. Ministry of Education, Govt. of India initiated the Ph-III of the project, and its duration is from 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2026. [2] [3]
With the primary aim to integrate significant Indian digital and non-digital libraries through a single-window platform, as well as ensuring accessibility to educational resources for every demographic the library was dedicated to the nation on 19 June 2018, by the Union Human Resource Minister Prakash Javadekar. [4]
The digital library portal's development began as a pilot project (NDLI Ph-I) in April 2015. By 2016, the beta version of the portal went live. This period is marked for aggregating content and establishing partnerships with numerous institutions across India, including central libraries of various universities, public libraries, and other educational institutions. The portal quickly expanded its repository and incorporated tools to facilitate access and usability, including multilingual support.[ citation needed ]
The official launch of the NDLI platform occurred on 19 June 2018, aiming to democratize access to knowledge for over 50 million students across India. By 2019, NDLI had aggregated over 30 million items in more than 70 languages, covering subjects such as literature, science, mathematics, engineering, and medicine. This period is marked for expanding its reach and integrating advanced technological features to enhance user experience. A new and more user-friendly UI was launched to make it accessible on various devices, promoting wider use in both urban and rural areas. By that time NDLI also enhanced its capabilities in handling and preserving Indigenous content, including rare manuscripts and folk literature, thus contributing to the preservation of cultural heritage.[ citation needed ]
As hundreds of schools, colleges, and universities across India went into complete lockdown on 25 March 2020, NDLI had to adapt quickly, evolving from a ‘data-focused’ approach to one centred on ‘agility and service.’ This required significant efforts in classifying content into user-targeted services, resulting in the first major overhaul of the site since its inception. [5]
Phase Two of the NDLI project was approved for the period from 2017 to 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project timeline was extended. In 2021, the Ministry of Education, Government of India, extended the NDLI project until 2026. As normal activities gradually resumed after the pandemic, a major overhaul of NDLI was implemented to further enhance its capabilities and reach.[ citation needed ]
On 22 April 2024, the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) launched its 3.0 version. NDLI 3.0 is designed to create a more personalized user experience through an enhanced interface.[ citation needed ]
NDLI currently houses content from 23 state boards and national boards such as CBSE and NCERT. The range of content includes school, college, and university-level topics, as well as material for 21st-century skills such as digital literacy, language and communication, and scientific temper. These resources are available in text, video, audiobook, presentations, and simulations in multiple Indian languages, aligning NDLI’s objectives with the vision of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.[ citation needed ]
Like other digital libraries worldwide, NDLI faces the challenge of disseminating, popularizing, and increasing user awareness of its platform. To address this, several initiatives have been undertaken with the assistance of the Government of India. The NDLI club is one of these initiatives. [6]
In 2020, the Indian government launched the National Education Policy (NEP 2020), and NDLI seized that opportunity to promote the platform and help educational institutions adopt key recommendations outlined in NEP 2020. One such recommendation is the establishment of topic-centred and project-based clubs designed to nurture students' interests and talents through supplementary enrichment material, guidance, and support.
NDLI launched the NDLI Club in March 2021. This digital initiative provides a platform for institutions to establish activity-based clubs where students can engage in various learning activities using content from the NDLI repository. The NDLI Club platform enables institutions to create events, upload reports, maintain event logs, automatically generate certificates, and build networks in order to exchange resources.[ citation needed ]
As of July 2024, over 5,800 institutions have established clubs using the NDLI Club platform, bringing together nearly 1.7 million members from different regions of India. The primary objective of the NDLI Club is to promote NDLI awareness among students and teachers through activity-based learning, offering NDLI as a valuable resource and service. [7]
The National Digital Library of India (NDLI) provides Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) services to academic institutions across India. To date, NDLI has facilitated the establishment of more than 150 IDRs, significantly enhancing the digital infrastructure of these institutions.[ citation needed ]
NDLI set up its own Digital Preservation Centre at Salt Lake in 2019. [8] Initially, the contents of "Presidency Alumni Association" were digitized there and integrated into NDLI. This features some contents such as:
User registration is open to users from around the world. However, contents from some popular sources are only accessible to registered users. Some of these registration-only works are from sources such as:
The library is managed by the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.
Electronic publishing includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes the editing of books, journals, and magazines to be posted on a screen.
National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of the United States is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital learning collections to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, both formal and informal, institutional and individual. NSDL's collections are refined by a network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge, and participation in the evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning.
An institutional repository (IR) is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics. However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders. As a result academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
National Institute of Technology Durgapur, formerly known as Regional Engineering College, Durgapur, is a public technical university in the city of Durgapur in West Bengal, India. Founded in 1960, it is one of India's oldest technical universities. It is located on a campus of 187 acres (0.75 km²).
Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) content repository architecture upon which institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital library systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application. It is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility are best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, also known as Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, is an institute of national importance and premiere higher-education institute located in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India. Established in 1997 by Government of India, MHRD. Initially started as IIITM, this institute was prefixed with ABV in 2002 to honour the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It is recognized as an Institute of National Importance as it has been established under The Indian Institute of Information Technology Act 2014.
BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.
The University College Dublin Library, composed of five separate bodies, holds varied ranges of digital and printed books on a wide range of topics, including architecture, arts and humanities, business studies, engineering, law, medicine, science, social sciences and veterinary medicine. In 2015 UCD Archives and the National Folklore Collection UCD came under the administrative umbrella of UCD Library. University College Dublin (UCD) is the Republic of Ireland's largest university. It is located in Dublin, Ireland.
The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, was a web-based publication of educational material from a number of Tufts University courses, providing open sharing of free, searchable, high-quality course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the global community. The Tufts OCW initiative encouraged the publication and free exchange of course materials on the World Wide Web. First launched in June 2005, Tufts OCW provided materials with strong representation from Tufts' health sciences schools, some of which were equivalent to textbooks in depth. All materials on the Tufts OCW site were accessible and free of charge. As Tufts OCW is not a distance learning program, no registration, applications, prerequisites, or fees are required and no credit is granted. Tufts ended funding for its Open Courseware initiative in 2014, and content on the Tufts OCW web site was removed on June 30, 2018.
The Handle System is a proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources". As with handles used elsewhere in computing, Handle System handles are opaque, and encode no information about the underlying resource, being bound only to metadata regarding the resource. Consequently, the handles are not rendered invalid by changes to the metadata.
Agropedia was an online knowledge repository for information related to agriculture in India. It included universal meta models and localized content for a variety of users with appropriate interfaces built in collaborative mode in multiple languages. This national portal, designed as an "agricultural Wikipedia" hosts wide range of agricultural information on a variety of crops, with an aim to empower farmers with crop information.
The National Policy on Education (NPE) is a policy formulated by the Government of India to promote and regulate education in India. The policy covers elementary education to higher education in both rural and urban India. The first NPE was promulgated by the Government of India by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1968, the second by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986, the third by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1992, and the fourth by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2020.
Higher education system in India includes both public and private universities. Public universities are supported by the union government and the state governments, while private universities are mostly supported by various bodies and societies. Universities in India are recognized by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which draws its power from the University Grants Commission Act, 1956. The main governing body is the University Grants Commission, which enforces its standards, advises the government, and helps coordinate between the center and the state. Accreditation for higher learning is overseen by various autonomous institutions established by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
PhET Interactive Simulations, a project at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a non-profit open educational resource project that creates and hosts explorable explanations. It was founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman. PhET began with Wieman's vision to improve the way science is taught and learned. Their stated mission is "To advance science and math literacy and education worldwide through free interactive simulations."
CORE is a service provided by the Knowledge Media Institute based at The Open University, United Kingdom. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and open access journals, enrich this content using text mining and data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. CORE works closely with digital libraries and institutional repositories.
In India, the Open Access movement started in May 2004, when two workshops were organized by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. In 2006, the National Knowledge Commission in its recommendations proposed that "access to knowledge is the most fundamental way of increasing the opportunities and reach of individuals and groups". In 2011, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) began requiring that its grantees provide open access to funded research, the Open Access India forum formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India. The Shodhganga, a digital repository for theses, was also established in 2011 with the aim of promoting and preserving academic research. The University Grants Commission (UGC) made it mandatory for scholars to deposit their theses in Shodhganga, as per the Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M. Phil./Ph.D. Degrees Regulations, 2016. Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals published in India, of which 233 have no fees.
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An open thesis, also known as an open dissertation, is a thesis that is freely available for members of the public to access upon publication, and often also during the planning and writing process. The decision to write an open thesis is made by the author, who will usually explain their rationale for creating an open thesis as part of the final published work or while developing it. Writing an open thesis is a process with many decision points regarding where and when to share information openly - from the planning stage, through research and writing, the defense/ voce viva and ultimate publication. Open theses are usually created and located in digital and multimodal formats.