Carnegie Mellon University

Title of Talk: National Digital Library of India - Building a National Asset

Abstract: In its five years of existence, the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) has now become a major integrator platform for content related to education and knowledge in India with more than 73 million indexed items under a unified search and browse facility with more than 6 million users of which 3.2 are active. It has been built by IIT Kharagpur on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Government of India with guidance and collaboration of a large number of organizations, experts and individuals. Other than standard capabilities, it also has various interesting collections catering to different segments. During the pandemic, NDLI was a national educational lifeline for various grades of students. This talk shall briefly describe the journey, architecture, collaborations and future roadmap of NDLI. The talk will especially highlight the support and partnership with DLI to structure and ingest the this painstakingly created treasure trove as a special collection into the NDLI portal giving it a permanent home, due to which a large number of users from all over the world are able to access this set which remains a primary source of many researchers.We will also propose a longer term and wider collaboration with the next phase of DLI / MBP.