The Human Resource Development ministry has said that the first phase of its National Digital Library will be complete by February, reports the Indian Express. This will include reaching 1 million digitized books and journals from 100 institutes. The library will be accessible to everyone. Interestingly, the National Digital Library is a pretty old initiative. The Deity announced the program back in August 2010. The mission states that it will make collaborative arrangement between institutions in India and the US to digitize a million books containing both technical literature and art. The project is listed as completed, with 13 servers installed at nodal centers to host the books. The nodal centres are provided with internet speeds between 512 kbps and 2 Mbps to host these servers (ouch!). The mission page also lists various organizations from which it will get content to digitize, and the stage of digitization the data is in. The digital library website is currently hosted by two agencies: IUCAA in Pune and IISc in Bangalore. Both websites pretty much mirror each other, although the Bangalore hosted page prompts the user to check out the new DLI (Digital Library of India) website out. However, this just leads to a dead link. Books can be searched for on the website alphabetically either by author or title name, by year, by subject or by language. Topics of books include astrophysics, education, chemistry, law, biology, mathematics, mythology etc., while languages include Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, other than English. The website’s interface is…
