The National Digital Library of India has opened up its 3.5 crore-strong digital contents, such as e-books, questions papers and solutions, lecture materials and thesis among others to help students study at home.
Also it has built a repository named ‘Covid-19 research resource repository’ to bring in latest research materials from across the world – a kind of a single window access to various types of materials related to Covid-19, be it data, research work, videos, challenges and funds.
“During the lockdown, when schools and colleges are all closed. But students will need to study. Hence NDLI is opening up its contents to students, researchers, teachers and learners of all ages. Students can now access 3.5 crore digital contents in various languages,” said PP Chakrabarti, principal investigator of the library and a professor of computer science and engineering at IIT Kharagpur.
The NDLI is the largest online library in the country especially for academic purposes. It was set up by the union human resource development ministry (MHRD) under its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) and is run and managed by IIT Kharagpur.
Out of the 3.5 crore digital content, while 2.7 crore were open access document, another 77 lakh digital content has been made freely accessible to NDLI users through national license by MHRD.
{{/usCountry}}Out of the 3.5 crore digital content, while 2.7 crore were open access document, another 77 lakh digital content has been made freely accessible to NDLI users through national license by MHRD.
{{/usCountry}}“The 3.5 crore strong digital content includes a wide range of materials in the form of e-books, audio books, lecture materials, thesis, reports, articles, journal papers, questions papers, solutions, data and simulation tools in addition to otherwise popular formats of video lectures and courses,” he added.
The library has also put up a special button called ‘Corona Outbreak: Study from Home” that contains specially curated materials for school and college students covering Engineering, Science, Management, Humanities and Law.
“While these are for students, for people interested in ongoing research work around the world on Covid-19, we have set up the repository. Already around 40,000 research-related work and documents have been uploaded,” said PP Das, a professor of computer science engineering and the joint principal investigator of NDLI.
The repository may be used for literature survey, to access data to carry out experiments, to study reports, to look at videos, to know about journals and conferences for carrying out research on Covid-19 and its induced effects and to design related activities.
Innovators, incubators and entrepreneurs may use it for ideation, to identify challenges, to look around funding options and to plan for startup around Covid-19.