The Hindu : `Vidya Nidhi' project puts Indian doctoral theses online

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 25, 2003

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`Vidya Nidhi' project puts Indian doctoral theses online

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE JULY 24. The Library and Information Science Department of Mysore University has taken up an ambitious project which aims to create an online data base of all doctoral theses and dissertations published by Indian universities.

Having successfully completed the pilot project sponsored by the Union Science and Technology Ministry's National Information System for Science and Technology, the university has begun work this month on the national task of digitising around 30,000 theses in English and multiple Indian languages published every year by 300 Indian universities and autonomous educational institutions.

The project, "Vidya Nidhi", is fuelled by a $155,000 (Rs. 75 lakhs) grant from the Ford Foundation spread over three years and is assisted by Microsoft in harnessing industry-standard tools such as Unicode (for handling non-Roman scripts) and the Web language, Extended Markup Language (XML).

In the pilot stage, 200 theses of Mysore University, many in Kannada, have been digitised and placed on the project's website www.vidyanidhi.org.in for free access and download. A bibliographic database of over 40,000 records has also been created.

Project investigators are currently networking with other Indian universities to bring their theses archives into a single searchable web resource. Over 25 such institutions have been covered.

Shalini Urs, Project Director of Vidya Nidhi, told The Hindu during a briefing on Wednesday that the University Grants Commission (UGC) was soon expected to insist that all accredited universities create electronic versions of doctoral theses in future.

This would simplify the task of creating a digital database. However, the challenge lays in handling each university's legacy holdings of such documents, mostly in bound and printed form and going back for decades.

While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools were being used to create digital versions of English texts, the task was more complicated when it came to multiple Indian scripts, Dr. Urs added.

The Programme Manager (Localisation) for Microsoft, Raveesh Gupta, who is interfacing with the Vidya Nidhi project, explained that while there are hundreds of initiatives in creating Indian language software solutions, most of these cannot "talk to each other" because there are hardly any Indian language standards that everyone follows.

By leveraging the Indian language localisation tools available with Microsoft products such as various flavours of Windows and Office, the company is supporting the Vidya Nidhi team in its efforts to create databases that anyone, anywhere can access.

The project is a member of international digital library initiatives including the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (www.ndltd.org) .

Together with Vidya Nidhi, they try to ensure that rich information resources such as academic theses that may not be able through conventional channels of publishing are made available for sharing worldwide, using the Internet as the driver.

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