Dr. Madan Singh Rana
University Librarian, H.N.B Garhwal University
Srinagar (Uttarakhand)
and
Dr. Rajneesh,
Banasthali University, Banasthali, (Rajasthan)
NACLIN ,December 10-12, 2013
The linguistic diversity is one of the important vehicles
to uphold Indian culture and tradition for posterity,
thus, to keep our tradition and culture intact, a proper
care should be extended to all Indian languages in the
present digital era through localization of ICTs.
The universities, being higher educational organizations
in India can facilitate the localization of ICT according
to local needs of the society. Therefore, universities can
play an important role in use of ICTs in the
communities around them, especially in rural areas.
Like, Banasthali University has carried out various
projects of localization of ICT and digitization to
preserve the Rajasthan heritage in particular.
Accomplishment of such projects can be helpful to
mobilize ICTs.
Such projects are important to mobilize the use
of ICTs in the society and would help in
reducing the socio-cultural and economic
obstacles in India. The role of the universities
can be critical for making ICTs useful in the
local communities, especially in rural areas.
Such process would also be helpful in preserving
the Indian minority languages, which are at the
verge of extinction, seeing that some of them
have already become extinct.
Enormous prospects are available to make efforts at the
universities levels which would not only help in preserving the
languages, but also through localization of ICTs, the local people
will receive proper benefits from ICTs and in turn, as being ICT
literate- they may be helpful to the Govt. projects; e-governance,
NeGP (India), etc in their localities and other developmental
activities of the society .
The Digital Library of India project in particular accomplished
by Banasthali, has been instrumental in preserving a huge
documented knowledge base available in Rajasthan through
scanning of more than 93,000 rare documents in almost all
Indian languages from the major and old libraries. Similar kind
of efforts would be needed from the universities in India to
preserve our national heritage for posterity.
Banasthali is a fully residential women’s university, which offers
an integrated education system extending from the primary
education up to Ph.D. level. It was establish on October 6, 1935
that Smt. Ratan Shastri and Pandit Hiralal Shastri founded
Banasthali to fill up the vacuum created by the sudden death of
their highly talented and promising daughter Shantabai.
The educational programme is based on the concept of five-fold
education (Punchmukhi Shikha) comprising Physical, Practical,
Aesthetic, Moral and Intellectual education. Its aims at
developing student’s integrated and balanced personality.
Emphasis on Indian culture and thought characterized by simple
living and khadi wearing are hallmarks of life at Banasthali.
The importance of library was recognized by the Banasthali in the early days
of its beginning. So, the library came into existence in 1935 and built-up a
collection of 1700 books till 1939.
At present, the library collection surpasses two lakhs documents. In addition
to central library there are campus/departmental libraries viz. Jaipur Campus,
AIM & ACT, WISDOM & Education, Law, Physical Sciences, Biological
Sciences, Geography & Remote Sensing, Home Science, Fashion Technology,
etc.
This rich and valuable collection built over eight decades has some of the rare
reference materials and several important journals. Apart from >10,000 online journals received through UGC-INFONET, the library currently receives
over 600 periodical titles. The library offers almost all services to its patrons.
The library has been using the LIBSYS, and has >1.60 lakhs records of books
(bibliographic Information) and 15,000 back volumes of periodicals.
The adaptation or alteration of ICT according to local and
specific needs of the society is called localization.
According to UNESCO “the Asia Pacific region is home
to about half of the world's spoken languages: more than
3,500 languages are spoken in Asia Pacific out of about
6,800 languages spoken in the entire world. The Indian
Census of 1961, recognized 1652 different languages
including languages not native to the Subcontinent.
According to the Census of India (1991) 1576 classified
mother languages available in India, whereas, according to
the sources 415 living languages are available in India.
Further, Anthropological Survey of India has reported that
325 languages have been used for in-group
communication.
The great linguistic diversity presents a significant
social barrier to widespread use of ICTs. If
communities in the region are to cross over into the
information age, ICTs must be enabled in their
languages. Localization is necessary to give these
communities the opportunity to use and benefit from
the ICT revolution.
The developing countries are still lagging in diffusion
of ICT as compare to the developed world. So, we
should not see Localization to be limited to interface
translation and other basic changes in the computing
platform. The localization has a broader scope that
includes the entire range of script, speech and language
technology to enable access to information for the enduser.
By the end of 2013, the Internet penetration would be
around 40% (three billion users) world-wide whereas
the penetration of Asia & Pacific Region would be
32%.
However, in India, the Internet penetration would be
around 13%, whereas around 43% would be in China
by 2013. The penetration in the rural India would be
only around 7%.
Low Internet penetration limits to exploit the benefits
of the potential of ICT. Nearly 42% of the internet users
prefer to access Internet only in Local languages. Thus,
with more content becoming available in the local
languages, more users will start using the internet.
In India, though many organizations and groups are
working to have Indian languages enabled on
computers, however, a lot of efforts still to be put in this
direction. The universities, like Banasthali University
and others are carrying out the localisation process very
well and however, similarly, others should come forward
to provide a proper momentum in use of ICT for the
society. As having the world-class infrastructure and
committed faculty and technical manpower at Banasthali
University, both national and international organizations
have assigned a number of projects on localization of
ICT to the University.
“CoIL-Net “IT for Socioeconomic Development of Rajasthan”– a Ministry of
Information Technology, GOI Project in the Department of Computer Science &
Electronics, AIM & ACT (2002-2005).
Gyanaudyog' - IT Culture Development & Women Empowerment through
Localised Home Entrepreneurship, Ministry of Communication &
Information Technology, GOI sponsored project, (2004-05) and ‘Gyanjyoti' a
similar project from DoIT& C, Government of Rajasthan in 2005.
Microsoft India sponsored students project: Microsoft India has given the
consultancy tasks to Banasthali University for the making of the software
projects under five categories.
Project 1:- Online English to Hindi dictionary for blind
Project 2:-A multilingual Authoring System for learning Hindi
Project3:-Akanksha: A web based visual environment in
Hindi for children
Project 4:- The database translation system
Project 5:- A health directory for Rajasthan
Vigyan Shabd Mala" A Bilingual Electronic Dictionary
for Nuclear Science, Computer Science & Electronics, 2
years 1998-99 , BRNS, Dept. of Atomic Energy, Govt. of
India.
Development of Courseware in Hindi for DOEACC ‘O’
Level Courses, Computer Science & Electronics, 18
Months (1999-2000), Govt. of India Dept. of Electronics,
New Delhi.
Development of web based learning systems in Indian
languages, Computer science & electronics, 2 years
(2000-2002) MCIT, Govt. of India.
Gyan-Jyoti - IT Skill up gradation of women
entrepreneurs, DoIT & C , Govt. of Rajasthan, Jaipur.
The above projects and initiatives accomplished by the
Banasthali University on the localisation of ICT and
diffusion of technology, right from content creation to
tailoring hardware and software as per the needs of the
community for their empowerment and use of ICT for
their livelihoods. These examples from Banasthali
University show that ICT localisation can be done
through projects and other initiatives for the society and
fulfill the inherent mandate of social inclusion and
empowerment of local community, more importantly
for women empowerment in case of Banasthali
University.
Many digitization projects and initiatives have been initiated in the country, not
only to preserve its knowledge base, but also make it accessible irrespective of
time and space by Govt. Organisations/NGOs. The Department of Information
Technology, MCIT, Govt. of India has mainly supported projects in
collaboration with “Carnegie Melon University, USA, under Million Book
Universal Digital Library Programme and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
These are:
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ERNET India;
IIIT Allahabad and Hyderabad;
NIT Sikkim
MIDC, Mumbai;
Central Library Hyderabad and State Central Library Hyderabad;
Sri Jagadguru Shankaracharya Mahasamsthanam Dakshinamanga
Sri Sharada Peetham, Sringeri;
Sringeri, Math , Sringeri Karnataka;
C-DAC Noida and Kolkata;
IGNCA, New Delhi;
Universities: Banasthali, Delhi, Hyderabad, Goa, Pune. Kashmir etc.
National Digital Library project: funded by the DIT across the country
successfully. However, only six universities have been actively
contributing this major digitization effort, despite the fact that:
They are the major repository of such resources. Thus, the
contribution of universities and old colleges could have been more
pervasive as being the major contributors in developing knowledge
base and also transforming this to the younger generation.
Since, availability of universities and colleges are almost
everywhere in the country, so they can, at least, identify the
availability of such rare collection of documents around their
localities.
Like, Banasthali and other universities have been contributing in
this effort.
Under Digital library of India (DLI) initiatives under DIT, MCIT, Govt. of
India, a project entitled as Digitization of Rare Books on Rajasthan
Heritage was initiated by the Banasthali University with the aim to
digitized the rare books of copyright free available in the different
libraries and institutions of Rajasthan was entrusted to the university by
DIT, MCIT, Govt. of India.
In the first phase 80 lakhs pages (more than 40,000 books) were scanned
and uploaded on websites of DLI and Banasthali University.
After successful completion of the first phase DIT, MCIT, in the second
and third phase of the digitization of rare books of more than 100 lacs
pages (59,000 books) were scanned by the university.
Recently, completed third phase in 2013, during all three phases, the
Banasthali University has scanned altogether more than 93 thousands
Rare Books (more than 380 lakhs of pages) from more than thirty
different libraries/ organizations in Rajasthan and some also from other
States, like- Gujarat and Maharashtra .
After digitization of rare book collection, scanned pages
are uploaded on the website of DLI (IISc, Bangalore)
and also Banasthali University website.
Each and every book has assigned suitable metadata
using metadata standards to make it searchable, so that
anyone can search these scanned pages or books free of
cost on web sites of Banasthali University and DLI. The
search can be made by the name of contributors,
keywords, titles, etc.
Though the project has already covered some of the
important libraries in the major cities like Jaipur,
Bikaner, Ajmer, Udaipur, Kota, Jodhpur and others very
well, however, still it has ample scope to get a large
number of such documents of rarity in nature in the
small towns and villages.
This collection would be main treasure for the
researchers and historians. Since most of the scanning
institutions/centers were very specialized, so the rare
books available with them were also unique. Although
the highest books digitized were in English and Hindi,
but books in Sanskrit, Gujarati, Urdu, Marathi, Arabic,
Persian, Bengali and Sindhi are the main attraction of
the collection. Also reasonably good numbers of books
were available in the languages like Punjabi, Oriya,
Avadhi, Brij, Telgu, Tamil, Kannad, Nagari
(Rajasthani), French, and Tibetan.
DLI project has been carried out in more than 35 Centers identified on the basis
of availability of rare books with them. The collection was covering almost all
subjects, however, History, Education, Literature and Philosophy and Religion
were among the top.
The old and rare records of Princely States and of British Period have been
digitized from different libraries, particularly in Rajasthan University, Mohanlal
Sukhadia University and Jai Narayan Vyas University Library.
Apart from the above universities, other digitization centers were:
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SMS Medical College Library,
Jaipur, Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, Mumbai,
Prakrat Bharti Acedamy, Jaipur,
Sanmati Library,
Government College, Kota,
RNT Medical College, Udaipur,
Chimanlal Mangaldas
Granthalaya Gujarati Sahitya Parishad,Ahmedabad,
Jain Vishva Bharti, Ladnun,
Banasthali Vidyapith
Shri Jawahar Vidyapith Binasar, Bikaner,
Mugniram Bangur Memorial Engineering College, Jodhpur,
Digamber Jain Atishay Kshetra,
Jain Vidhya Sansthan Library, Mahaveer Ji (Karauli),
Shree Jubilee Naagari Bhandar, Bikaner, Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad Arabic and Persian Research Institute, Rajashtan, Tonk,
Bharatiya Vidya Mandir Shoudh Prathisthan, Bikaner,
Kumarappa Institute of Gram Swarj, Jaipur,Dadu Dayal Sanskrit
College, Jaipur
Shri Jain Swetamber Khartargacch Sangh,
Jaipur,Farbus Gujarati Sabha, Kirtan Kendra, Mumbai,
Acharya Shri Vinaychandra Gyan Bhandar, Jaipur,
Adarsh Library, Jaipur,
National Library, Bandra,
Charan Sahitya Shodh Sansthan, Ajmer,
Jain Acharya Sanskrit College, Sanganer,
Shri Abhaya Jain Granthalya, Bikaner,
Agarchand Bhairondan Sethiya
Jain Parmarthik Sanstha, Bikaner,
Bhartiya Shruti Darshan Kendra, Jaipur,
Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahala, Mumbai,
Divine Library, Jaipur,
Keshav Vidiya Pith, Jamdoli, Jaipur,
Shree Swaroop Govind Pareek College, Jaipur, and
Rashtrya Ayurvedik Sansthan, Jaipur.
i) The present linguistic diversity in India, with the use of ICTs and localization
efforts can be transformed into knowledge-based society which, in turn, can
offer an opportunity to proper use ICT and get the benefits out of ICT
revolution. Thus, localization effort would be required at all levels of the
society to make India as a knowledge-economy country.
ii) Nowadays, use of the internet based services is not just for mining and searching
information and communicating with others, but, it has become a vital mean for
our daily transactions and other works. Conversely, low internet penetration in
India, having only 13% overall and around 7% in the rural India (according to
the recent reports), which needs to be improved considerably, in conjunction
with promotion of an active use of internet.
iii) Universities in India through localization efforts can accumulate the native and
rare knowledge from their localities and preserve and help in transferring this
knowledge to younger generations. Further, the universities can be handy in
conversion of available tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge by engaging
students for their dissertations or through project modes. Like so, the
universities can contribute to bank the traditional knowledge available in
different languages, minority languages in particular, to avoid them becoming
extinct.
iv) Traditionally, Rajasthan, is known for its rich cultural diversity and heritage
based knowledge and now, it is emerging a hub of higher educational
institutions. So, the universities/colleges can contribute a lot in the preserving
the knowledge heritage of the State, particularly rare literature and
manuscripts available in the State. Banasthali University is an excellent
example of what the universities can do for their localities and region in the
preservation of knowledge heritage. Now, many agencies, like DIT, MCIT,
Govt of India and others are funding for such activities . Only we have to
come forward and take the initiatives.
v) Further, such efforts are essentially becoming vital from libraries’
perspective, like:- for creating technology enabled environment to catch up on
the technology adoption front. Furthermore, this kind of effort leads to a
concept of ‘libraries everywhere’ which would give them a chance to reinvent
themselves in the present age of internet. As a result the libraries can position
themselves toward more accountable to the society and can answer to the
emerging concept like Return on Investment (RIO) by preserving and
disseminating the heritage of local knowledge, as the big brains never go
outdated. Further, the project, like Digital Library of India (DLI) has an ample
scope to be extended to the small towns of Rajasthan.
some suggestions offered in this regard:
a)
Standardization in the procedures: Though some guidelines have been issued
by the funding organizations and other institutions, however, these are so
general guidelines which demonstrate difficulty in achieving a unison
product. So it is difficult to achieve the quality.
b) Coordinated efforts at National level: Various projects have been sanctioned on
the digitization process by the different organizations in India. But due to no
coordination among the funding agencies, a lot of duplication has been found,
which leads to wastage of national resources.
c) National/State-level of mapping of the availability of Rare and important
Information resources: Apart from some work done by National Manuscript
Mission on the availability of manuscripts in India, however, such efforts have not
been done in identifying the valuable rare knowledge resources available in India.
Now, of course, the Union Catalogues of INFLIBNET and DELNET can be use to
indentify such resources and a national mapping of rare knowledge resources in
India, which can save a lot of time and energy in identifying such resources.
d) Suitable financial support at the inception level of the project: The financial
support being paid by the funding organizations has totally been based on output of
scanned documents, like- one Rupee per scanned page, was given to the Banasthali
during 1st and 2nd phase. At the initial level of commencing the project, through
such amount it would very difficult to start the project without the support of
university/organization which are operating the project as done by the Banasthali.
Therefore, at the starting of project some additional funding for establishing
digitization centre would be suggested to be given to the universities/organizations
those are willing to contribute in this process.
e) Cooperation from the identified rare-documents-rich-institutes: Different work
cultures, timings and rules of the institutes are some time obstacles and creating
some problems in keeping a proper work flow of the project up. All the identified
institutions should cooperate with the University/organization in commencing the
projects in their organizations, as most of such projects are the time bound and
output oriented projects. They should rather extend their help to the digitization
centre to overcome the problems, like- identifying the trained manpower in their
localities, rural areas in particular, which is a real problem of getting suitable
manpower in rural areas while running the project in such areas.
vi) Finally, the libraries should alter their collection development policies on the basis
of the future need-focused strategies for research and education by augmenting
digitization process of all valuable knowledge based resources around the localities.
a) Like Banasthali University, such projects should be envisioned in the
partnership among IT professionals, library professionals and local digitization
centers.
b) To reduce the anxiety among the users of having a large number of digital
contents available here and there on the internet, a proper metadata scheme, MARC
21may be helpful in searching the appropriate contents, along with other discovery
tools.
c) Many researchers, Social Sciences and Humanities in particular, are not
aware of such efforts are being made and availability of such resources on the Internet,
so, a proper marketing of these resources and projects should be on the top agenda of
libraries.
d) Since various projects across the world digitizing the contents in English
language, thus, our focus should be on other than English languages, preferably Indian
and South Asian.
On the whole, such projects and efforts
would help libraries to show the way to
achieve their goals through user-centric
approach.