IIIT Hyderabad Joins National Digital Library Initiative (NDLI) Book Club

Introduction

The National Digital Library of India (NDLI) is an initiative sponsored and mentored by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, through its National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT). It is an online repository of free learning resources, which intends to provide academic support to students, teachers, researchers, and other learners in general. It aims to achieve this by creating a single-window search facility for browsing through all kinds of digital educational resources.

NDLI clubs would be set up in all the member institutes. The aim of these clubs is to conduct events that help students gain knowledge and improve their skills in topics that are not limited to their curriculum. The events may be conducted either physically or virtually.

Features of NDLI

1. The website has a vast collection of more than 72 million resources. It provides various search filters for the user to easily access the relevant content, such as text, video across multiple sources such as MIT OCW, NPTEL, etc.

It also contains content from other digital repositories such as the Internet Archives, LibreTexts, research articles and other publications from other top Indian universities.

Accessibility 

Not all articles are open to the public; they are classified into 4 categories based on access restriction:

1)    Open: The content is available in its entirety to everyone (NCERT etc.).

2)    Limited: A part of the content is open to the public, but full access requires authorisation from the source authority.

3)    Subscribed: The entire content is available to institutions that have subscribed to the source (e.g. Springer).

4)    Authorized: The entire content is accessible only upon authorisation by the source authority and separate login to the source.

NDLI on Comparison

The number of resources in NDLI is less compared to other websites such as LibGen and the Internet archive. But, unlike these sites, NDLI has only educational content. Further, unlike NDLI, LibGen and other shadow libraries do not contain content in formats other than text, and they are marred in controversy for copyright violations. NDLI includes links to other free digital libraries as well.

Since the AICTE has made the registration of all its member institutions into the NDLI club mandatory, the research articles and publications of these institutes are available, partly or entirely, to the public. This is something that other libraries lack. In addition, the events conducted by the NDLI club are unique to an online repository and aid the members in learning better.

Recent Activities of The NDLI Club

NDLI club has recently conducted an event for all club members, “Afternoon with an Author”. It was a book discussion event with its author and other eminent panellists. The book under discussion was “The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha”. The session was live-streamed on YouTube and was successful with the participation of eminent speakers such as Jairam Ramesh (Indian economist and member of the Rajya Sabha), among others.

Editor: Pratishtha Abrol