Library digitisation yet to take off

Indian libraries, storing rare archival material on the country's rich cultural history and precious document collections, presented a virgin ground for the application of digital projects, an international expert on library management said here on Tuesday.

Andrew Morrice, vice-president (Asia-Pacific) of leading Australian library technology provider firm Sirsi said at a seminar here that India, with at least 70 big libraries apart from hundreds of smaller ones, had a nascent market for digitisation projects waiting to be tapped.

The Indian market for software in digitisation had grown from $ 100,000 a few years back to about $ 500,000 today.

"These precious documents as well as images are just lying without much use of preservation techniques in so many nooks and corners of the country. These form the country's national heritage and must be converted into digitised format as fast as possible," Morrice, here to initiate a survey of Indian libraries, said.

Using sophisticated search technology that provides far superior access than trying to access the actual physical item, the huge volume of data and images could be scanned and made available on-line for users globally but the Indian beaureaucratic set-up must realise the necessity to preserve the country's rare heritage, he added.

The system would also enable libraries to create more employment opportunities as well as generate revenue by charging a fee for on-line access of information, he added.

Speaking on the occasion, Santosh Bose, managing director of library management systems firm STS said, "It is very difficult to provide digital solutions to Indian libraries since they deal with documents in an array of Indian languages unlike libraries in other countries which generally have a single language database. This is where the tremendous opportunity lies".

Pointing out that the economic gains derived out of revenue generation by putting a price tag on archival material could be immense, he said digitisation projects offered a number of other post-operational benefits.