The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Multimedia national digital library centre proposed

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 28, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Multimedia national digital library centre proposed

By our Special Correspondent

TIRUPATI. Dec 27. The computer and robotic scientist, Raj Reddy, who is spearheading the Universal Library Project in collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon Univesity, Pittsburgh, USA, on Monday said a multimedia digital library centre was proposed in the country at the national level. Talking to mediapersons, he said he had already broached the subject with the Centre and hoped that it would be accomplished in the next few months. The project, he pointed out, would envisage creation of an exclusive portal for the digital library (DL) to help it foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge.

First step

As a first step, he said, it was proposed to create the DL with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books -- predominantly in Indian languages available to everyone over the internet. Very soon we expect that this portal would provide a gateway to Indian digital libraries in science, arts, culture, music, movies, traditional medicine, palm leaves and many more, Dr. Reddy added.

He earlier visited the TTD's Sri Venkateswara Digital Library here and interacted on its working with the TTD's Executive Officer, Ajeya Kallam, and the Library Director, Bhuman Subramanyam Reddy. He is already associated with the TTD's DL which is a constituent of Reddy's Online Universal Library Project (ULP).

He said the ULP was embarking upon an ambitious million-book digital library project to produce an extensive and rich test bed for use in further textual language processing research. He hoped that at least 10,000 books among the million would be in more than one language and said that the large digitization project would enable extensive research in the areas of machine summerisation, intelligent indexing and information mining-- the main tools required in the discipline.

He said that TTD, being a premier religious institution in the country, had a special role to play in preserving and handing down to posterity all the information regarding Indian cultural and social ethos and pointed out that was what it was now precisely doing by becoming a member of the Universal Library Project.

He said a couple of persons from the TTD library would be trained in the USA in scanning palm leaf and other manuscripts so back home they would be useful in doing the critical job besides training others.

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