Inauguration of International Conference on Digital Libraries - 2004

Digital Library and its Multidimensions

I am indeed delighted to inaugurate the International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL) 2004 organized by The Department of Culture in partnership with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). My greetings to the organizers, all stake holders in the digitization and the knowledge business, library and information science professionals, e-Learning community and the participants of the conference. I am happy to see that there are many distinguished technologists and Library professionals gathered here from all over the world. You have all made significant contributions to create Digital Libraries in your own country and in your own sphere of expertise. We have many initiatives in India including the Digital Library of India Portal. I would request all of you to evolve methodologies to share all our Digital Contents with no barriers. This will truly speak of the technology as an integrator of people. I urge all of you to pledge that we will share information of value freely to those citizens in the less privileged nations across the world. I would like to talk to this audience on ?Digital library and its Multidimensions?.

Core competence for Knowledge Society

Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. A knowledge society is one of the basic foundations for the development of any nation. Knowledge has many forms and it is available at many places. The acquisition of knowledge has therefore been the thrust area throughout the world and sharing the experience of knowledge is a unique culture of our country. Digital Library is a new instrument, which can spread the knowledge nearly at the speed of light. India is a nation endowed with natural and competitive advantages as also certain distinctive competencies. But these are scattered in isolated pockets and the awareness on these is inadequate. During the last few centuries the world has undergone a change from agriculture society, where natural labour was the critical factor, to industrial society where the management of technology, capital and labour provided the competitive advantage. In the 21st century, a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. Efficient utilisation of existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth for the nation in the form of better health, education, infrastructure etc. for improving the quality of life. Ability to create and maintain the knowledge infrastructure, develop knowledge workers and enhance their productivity through creation, growth and use of new knowledge will be the key factors in deciding the prosperity of this Knowledge Society. Whether a nation has emerged as a knowledge society or not is judged by the way the country effectively deals with knowledge creation and knowledge deployment.

Dimensions of Knowledge Society

I was studying different dimensions of knowledge society, how will it be different from the industrial economy. In the knowledge economy the objective of a society changes from fulfilling the basic needs of all round development to empowerment. The education system instead of going by text book teaching will be promoted by creative, interactive self learning ? formal and informal with focus on values, merit and quality. The workers instead of being skilled or semi-skilled will be knowledgeable, self-empowered and flexibly skilled. The type of work instead of being structured and hardware driven will be less structured and software driven. Management style will emphasize more on delegation rather than giving command. Impact on environment and ecology will be strikingly less compared to industrial economy. Finally, the economy will be knowledge driven and not industry driven.

Knowledge Society Components

Knowledge Society has two very important components driven by societal transformation and wealth generation. The societal transformation is on education, healthcare, agriculture and governance. These will lead to employment generation, high productivity and rural prosperity. How do we do that?

The wealth generation is a very important task for the nation, which has to be woven around national competencies such as Information Technology, bio-technology, space technology, weather forecasting, disaster management, tele-medicine and tele-education, technologies to produce native knowledge products, service sector and Infotainment. These technologies and management structures have to work together to generate knowledge society.

Evolution of policy and administrative procedures, changes in regulatory methods, identification of partners and most importantly creation of young and dynamic leaders are the components to be in place. In order to generate wealth, which is the second component for establishing a knowledge society, it is essential that simultaneously a citizen-centric approach to evolution of business policy, user-driven technology generation and intensified industry-lab-academy linkages have also to be established in every country.

Knowledge Management

The systematic process of finding, selecting, organizing, distilling and presenting information, improves an employee's comprehension in a specific area of interest. Knowledge management helps an organization to gain insight and understanding from its own experience. Specific knowledge management activities help focus the organization on acquiring, storing and utilizing knowledge for problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning and decision making. It also prevents intellectual assets from decay, adds to firm intelligence and provides increased flexibility.

Knowledge creation has two dimensions, one is explicit knowledge and the other one is implicit knowledge. The explicit knowledge comes from published books, written materials, proceedings, presentations etc., whereas the implicit knowledge is derived through the systematic observation and capturing of data from the tacit knowledge available among the individuals in the organization, through their approach to problem solving, bottle-neck removal, goals setting, interactions etc. We need a systematic mechanism to capture this knowledge to make the organization a truly learning organization which makes use of existing knowledge judiciously and efficiently.

Digital library is an important component for capturing the explicit knowledge. This has to be supplemented with the implicit knowledge to the digital library system, which will eventually get transformed into a knowledge management system. Let us study how the digital library influences knowledge management in India through research, design and development. This may be relevant to other countries also.

Digital library initiatives in India

There is a mission of Digital library web portal to create a portal for digital library of India piloted by the Ministry of Information Technology (MIT) with IISc and Carnegie Mellon University as partners for fostering creativity and free access to all human knowledge. This digital library as a first step will create a free-to-read searchable collection of one million books by 2005 in India. This library was launched in 2003. Prof.N Balakrishnan, Chief Coordinator of Digital Library of India informs me that, so far 20 centers are operational throughout the country, over 50,000 books have been digitized of which nearly 30,000 are in 9 Indian languages. In the library of Rashtrapati Bhavan, which is part of the Digital Library of India, we have so far digitized over one million pages and also we are digitizing our old official records leading to e-governance implementation. The data will be available for use by different institutions in the country and abroad, depending upon their needs. The programme is progressing in the right direction, but it needs an impetus to meet the targets of 2005.

When I visited Bulgaria, we had an opportunity to present the work on Digital Library of India. The Indology department at the Sofia University which is doing seminal work expressed a keen interest in our Indian Language Books which number to over 30,000 currently. In a recent follow up visit, I understand that our Honorable Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Dr. Arun Shourie has presented them with a CD giving the Titles and contents pages of all the books that we currently have in our Digital Library Portal and had requested them to select the books that they need so that the copies of those books in Digital form can be made on a few 250 Giga Bytes disks attached to a Personal Computer can be given to them. This small PC with two disks can hold more than 20,000 books - what is needed for a reasonably sized library. This sets the trend towards making personalized and affordable Digital Libraries for specialized use, which form a sub set of the main Digital Library of India.

Home Library: I would like to share with you my thoughts on my home library. Wherever I turn in any direction, all the selected books in my library invite and tempt me to read. They are my friends. Digital library has to be user friendly and should give equitable access to explicit information, irrespective of place, educational or economic status. Digital Library of India will unite the institutions and the people. Digital library is where the past meets the present and creates a future.

User-friendly Interface: I understand that the participating organizations in this mission of the Digital Library of India are storing the information locally and are also sending them to the Central Servers. What we need at this time is also concurrent measures to make very useful and highly user-friendly interfaces. This will make the Digital Library a friend of every one and its utility would enhance many folds. The organizers of this conference have given me the details of many initiatives for digitization across the country and abroad. These should be integrated so that there is inter-operability across the Digital Libraries Initiatives.

The future Digital Libraries would have speech interface so that the user could interact with the Information and will be language independent. Though this technology world over is progressing, still many more things have to be done. I would urge the learned audience to work in close collaboration to ensure introduction of Natural Interfaces to the Digital Libraries world over.

Digital Libraries are not the Digital Equivalents of the present day library. They would include, besides the books, manuscripts and journals, information and our heritage in all other forms including speech, folk songs, paintings and carvings. It is important that we take on this mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our Digital Library.

Traditional System storage: India has rich information relating to literature, music, traditional system of medicine and science embedded in palm leaves. It is necessary to search, understand and preserve this valuable information. Merely scanning the palm leaves would not be very useful. The number of people who can read the palm leaves and interpret the meanings, identify the plants and stones mentioned in the palm leaves is dwindling. Even those few who can read, cannot write very well, that too may not be fluent in entering into the computer in Digital Forms. The Optical Character Recognition of these ancient scripts is also a very tough problem, almost intractable technically. I suggest that for every palm leaf scanned, we record in audio the information read by the experts. We can then put these on the web and invite other experts to provide free and fair commentary and validate every palm leaf data. This data can also be used for creating a new generation of palm leaves reading experts - a species that has almost vanished.

Challenges before us

The digitization initiative has picked up momentum in the country; this is the time we have to make consistent national policies and procedures, which will lead to effective management and control of the data leading to enhancement of national knowledge base like what we have done in IT. Policy makers should take into account of the standardization requirements, inter-operability, copyright issues, classification of documents and selection and use of number of library information systems available with various organization in the country in different standards. I would recommend deliberation of this issue in the conference and constitution of a multi-disciplinary task force for working out the draft policy document for implementation. The policy should take into account the dynamics of the web services technology and keep provision of on-line improvement and variation in future digital library systems. The task force should have access to all available resources so that they can ensure prevention of duplication of efforts.

Knowledge Management Grid: We have to create a Knowledge Management Grid with the Central Digital Library Data Center equipped with the comprehensive Virtual Digital Library and Knowledge Management System into which all the participating organizations are connected with broadband along with Internet connectivity. When we are in the process of digitizing millions of books we have to plan for the infrastructure and storage requirements across the country with disaster recovery facility.

Research Areas: Connectivity is strength, connectivity is wealth, and connectivity is progress. For enabling knowledge connectivity in our rural areas, we need to have a comprehensive plan for developing new infrastructure for extending the digital library services in regional languages. These include ? development of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Software in all the Indian languages, language independent operating system, database servers, search engines, web servers and messaging servers. This will enable the digital library initiative to percolate to the rural masses in the form of e-governance, tele-education and tele-medicine. This has to be done in a mission mode with the active participation of Government, educational institutions, R&D Organizations along with private sector enterprises. Here lies the challenge. It is a fertile research ground for all participants and educational institutions ? a large number of Doctorates can be produced in this area alone to push the frontiers of knowledge in Language Independent Digital Library (LIDL) and the language independent infrastructure software initiatives.

Specific actions

1. Text Books: School children have been experiencing difficulty in getting textbooks in time, especially for the primary and secondary classes. It will be useful to digitize and store the textbooks in the library, which can be accessed by the students whenever required. This additional facility will enable easy availability of books to the students for instant reference and study through Internet and intranet access. In India, we have the greatest wealth of publicly funded books for schools and colleges. For example the National Book Trust of India and NCERT have many books in almost all the Indian languages. If we bring these to the Digital Library with periodical updation it will enable effective implementation of Right to Education Bill for our Children. This can be an outsourced service for the educational institutions.

2. Tele-Education: We need to integrate the tele-education system with the Digital library, so that the students can read and refer to the books suggested by the teacher from a distant location through on-line e-learning services.

3. Government File Storage: There are large numbers of files and records occupying valuable space in our State and Central Government offices. It is essential to segregate the important files which have to be preserved for a long duration. These segregated files have to be digitized and stored in the digital library. This will enable easy search, faster location of the data and also release huge space occupied by physical cupboards in our offices. In addition to this, the present data must be digitized and used in the workflow within the e-governance implementation. For this task, proper encryption system must be in place.

4. Land Record Storage: Land records have to be digitized and verified with satellite imagery and stored, which needs to be linked with e-governance applications for issue, transfer, conversions and additions and deletions. It should be linked with the revenue collection, estate management, and municipal records. Digitization and information flow has to go parallely to get the real advantage of e-governance workflow in the land records and its management domain.

5. Voters? List Digital Book: For India, the preparation of reliable voters? list and its maintenance is an important governance activity. Digital data of a voter should be made available on-line over the Internet for all the States and Union Territories as a digital book for reference. Each State should have a dedicated site for presentation of the data accessible to all voters as well as election officers for verification. We should collect the voters? list through various mechanisms such as palm tops, desktops connected to Internet on-line with the biometric authentication and photographs of the voters. This is to be stored in a central data center in each State which is connected to the national main data center to enable issuing of a single and unique code for each voter. It should be dynamically updated based on the movement of people wherever they go. We need to link the data of Registrar General and Census Commissioner with the voter?s data bank, which will proactively provide the data of new entrants into the voters? list and delete data of the persons after life seizure. May this effort be the forerunner for multipurpose National ID Card. 6. Modification to copyright Act: The Copyright Act was evolved when the rate of generation of new books and journals was low and it prescribed the protection period as fifty years in India. Similar are the time limits in other countries. In this millennium when the rate of flow of new books/journals has increased substantially, there is a need to have a re-look at the lock-in period of copyright documents. This International Conference could initiate action for reducing the copyright duration substantially.

Conclusion

Digital library is a national mission. We should see that all the schools, colleges, and universities digitize their libraries in their own native languages and connect to the outside world within the next 4 years. We have to ensure availability of fiber optic cables, satellite communication and wireless infrastructure especially in remote areas. It is also essential to realize high bandwidth technology like Multiple 10 Giga Bits connectivity across the country. Above all, just like I see in my library the book titles attracting me, I would like the first page of the Digital Library on my Laptop to have SDI (Selective Dissemination of Information) profile of individuals or schools/colleges.

May you be a master authority who can make use of the cumulative knowledge of the society through the digital library. May the proceedings of this International Conference on Digital Libraries 2004, reinforce our efforts in transforming nations into knowledge societies leading to their faster development and growth.

I wish the International Conference all success.