Books to be made available free of cost, even as copyright challenges remain.
The initiative of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to build the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) will target to add three crore users on the platform in a year. Apart from research material, NDLI also provides study material for competitive examinations and will soon introduce mock test facilities on the platform for free. However, major copyright challenges have not made it possible for NDLI to be able to provide full-text available as it faces hurdles.
Launching the digital library, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar had said, “Currently, the platform has 30 lakh users, but in a year’s time, it aims to reach a target audience of three crore, especially among those income groups where students find it particularly difficult to buy books.”
As of now, NDLI has procured those books that did not have copyright issues; books whose rights were shared with NDLI by various stakeholders or those that could be partially made available but requires authorisation for complete access.
Even as the NDLI intends to provide books, articles, manuscripts, thesis free of cost, copyright challenges have not make it entirely possible. The initiative, however, has helped India become a key player in the discourse on copyright issues. A key achievement of NDLI is to become a central search engine to find books across libraries in India and request access to them online through a single search window.
While it is easy to find a book through the search window on NDLI, it might not always be available for immediate consumption. The NDLI has collaborated with libraries in Indian educational institutions, public libraries as well as big international libraries to get access to books on a wide range of subjects.
While CBSE books are available free of cost, some sources like IISER, Bhopal, will provide only part of the text, while the full-text will require authorisation; other sources will allow access to the full-text upon subscription, for example Springer; another source, IIT Jodhpur, which has also contributed content from its library, would require authorisation through a separate login, moreover, there is content where the full-text is available as long as it is accessed from a member account on NDLI.
As of now, NDLI has collaborated with Rightsstatements.org which has drafted 12 standardised statements on digital cultural heritage to overcome challenges of digital rights. NDLI has collaborated with Europeana Foundation, an organisation tasked with developing a digital cultural heritage platform for Europe.
Speaking to The Sunday Guardian about India’s role in digital rights, Nanda Gopal Chottopadhyay, Chief Technical Officer, NDLI, said, “As of now, India has two representatives on the international steering committee that deals with copyrights issues of digital libraries. This will allow us to put our inputs on the issue and help in policymaking on digital rights of intellectual property. Soon, the homepage of rightsstatements.org could be read in Hindi and the statements will be available in Hindi and Bengali. The purpose of translating these international documents into regional languages is to improve their access and understanding among local librarians.”
However, in its quest to provide free books, NDLI also had to get tangled in s legal battle when it was reported that Satyajit Ray’s “Red Note Books”, with his handwritten notes, were being downloaded and sold in 2017 from the NDLI’s portal, thus resulting in removal of the print option from pdf and watermarking of every page.
The NDLI website had to be temporarily shut down after several books sourced from the Digital Library of India attracted notices of alleged breaches of copyright. NDLI also received rights violations notices from its European partners which were duly addressed.
NDLI is a digital library that boasts of 2 crore resource materials, out of which 40 lakh are books and has a collection of 1.26 crore articles. The platform has been built by the MHRD in collaboration with IIT-Kharagpur.