New Delhi: Student community, academicians, and other interest parties will now get all educational materials ranging from primary to post-graduate levels at the National Digital Library (NDL). Ministry of Human Resource Development under its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has already initiated the National Digital Library (NDL) pilot project to develop a framework of virtual repository of learning resources with a single-window search facility.
Ministry of HRD, under its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), has entrusted IIT Kharagpur to host, coordinate and set-up National Digital Library (NDL) towards building a national asset. The pilot project is almost ready. The pilot project is devising a framework suitable for future scale up with respect to content volume and diversity to become a full-blown National Digital Library of India over time. The ongoing pilot project is available at https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/ .
NDL is designed to upload content of any language and provides interface support for leading vernacular languages while currently education materials are available in English, Hindi and Bengali. This platform provides support for all academic levels including researchers and life-long learners, all disciplines, all popular form of access devices and differently-abled learners. Further, NDL platform aims at helping students to prepare for entrance and competitive examination, to enable people to learn and prepare from best practices from all over the world and to facilitate researchers to perform inter-linked exploration from multiple sources.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) has already requested all universities to advise the students of university and the affiliated colleges to register themselves on the NDL portal at https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/.
NDL repository integrates contents from different Indian Institutional Repositories. More than 40 types of learning resources are available currently. The online digital library provides Filtered and federated searching facilities focused searching so that learners can find out the right resource with least effort and in minimum time.
In the long run when NDL will be developed into full-scale platform, it will provide a single window search facility to act as a one-stop shop for all digital resources. The most user-friendly feature of the National Digital Library is it can be personalized based on the education level, choice of language, difficulty level, media of content and such other factors. Further, users and learners can get customised service provided in a 24×7 integrated environment where learners can find out the right resource with in minimum time.
