IGNOU initiates the creation of National Virtual Library of India

National Virtual Library of India

The Ministry of Culture is being aided by The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) under the National Mission of Libraries for creating a directory of libraries across India that not only include books, but also includes various resources from libraries, archives, museums, artefacts, just to name a few.

Making this possible is an open source platform, Koha. Koha will be free of cost, and with this, people will have access to any book, journal or manuscript just with a click of a mouse. This initiative is a being brought into action to benefit students, researchers, artists, scientists and differently-abled persons. The total expenditure of the initiative is reported to be around Rs 400 crore.

Uma Kanjilal, a professor at IGNOU told a leading daily, “IGNOU will have to collect bibliographic records of other major libraries across the country, provide training and data migration from other library automation software among other works.”

To bring this initiative into action, a five-day training was conducted at the campus of IGNOU. The training was organised jointly by the university, the Ministry of Culture and Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation. As a part of the training, the participants will get a hands-on training on Koha, the open source application.

National Mission of Libraries (NML) foresees the of a National Virtual Library database. Under the Ministry of Culture, six libraries, 35 state central libraries & 35 district libraries as model libraries will be developed.

The responsibility of developing the National Virtual Library of India (NVLI) has been laid on the shoulders of IGNOU, along with IIT-Bombay and CDAC. NML has the responsibility of hosting the Indian cultural heritage information on the digital web world.