Now, search the availability of any book/ manuscript/ periodical/ journal which you thought is no more available in your nearest library or a 3D image of any museum artefact with a click of a mouse. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) is aiding in the initiative of Ministry of Culture under the National Mission of Libraries by way of creating a unioncatalogue of libraries across India which apart from books includes artefacts and other resources from libraries, museums, archives etc. using open source platform Koha.

 

Prof. Ravindra Kumar, Vice Chancellor, IGNOU, during the inaugural session of a five day training workshop organised by IGNOU in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture and the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF), Kolkata emphasised the requirement of capacity building of library professionals especially with the major trend adoption of ICT applications in all walks of life and Digital India Initiative of Government of India.

 

The National Mission on Libraries (NML) consists of four components: creation of National Virtual Library of India (NVLI), setting up of NML model libraries, qualitative and quantitative survey of libraries and capacity building. 

 

IGNOU, along with IIT- Bombay and CDAC have been entrusted with the responsibility of developing the National Virtual Library of India (NVLI) under the National Mission on Libraries (NML) which will be hosting information of the entire Indian cultural heritage in the digital web world.“Major tasks ahead for IGNOU in this project lies in collection of bibliographic records of other major libraries across the country, avoiding reduplication of records, curation of authority lists and metadata, transliteration interface in Koha, implementation of Indic language interface in Koha, hands on training and data migration from other library automation software,” added Prof. Uma Kanjilal, IGNOU.

 

The workshop on capacity building programme of national mission on libraries for public library personnel started yesterday at IGNOU and would last for five days.IGNOU is giving hands on training to the participants on Koha open source applications in a dedicated NVLI lab in IGNOU campus, Delhi.

 

Pankaj Rag, Joint Secretary and Mission Director, NML, Ministry of Culture suggested innovative ideas to treat library as not just a repository of books but a fulcrum of activities around the world.

 

Dr. Arun Chakraborty, Director General, Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation informed the gathering that this is the 11^th such program as part of series conducted by NML to provide hands on training to personnel across libraries run by the Ministry of Culture and the states.

 

Deepika Pokharna, Director (Library), Ministry of Culture, said that, “Ministry’s thruston automation of library prevails. If you go for RFID technology, you can manage your library well.” She also mentioned that, even the artefacts of the museums, which cannot be displayed due to paucity of space, can be converted into 3D images and digitized.  “CDAC has developed software called JATAN that will help in digitizing it,” she added.