Digital Library of India

What is the Digital Library of India?

The Digital Library of India (DLI) is an initiative through the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a number of partners, to digitize all literature, art and science work of 'mankind' to make it freely available across the globe for the first time in history in hopes to offer insight, education and knowledge for everyone. The Digital Library of India hopes to preserve materials, history and indigenous knowledge digitally whereas it was housed and shared before in worn and often fragile states. With digital preservation methods, information can be stored, archived, and shared with libraries, museums and educators world wide. It also works to eradicate the opportunity for loss, damaged items and theft of rare and priceless documents.

Vision Statement:

"For the first time in history, all the significant literary, artistic, and scientific works of mankind can be digitally preserved and made freely available, in every corner of the world, for our education, study, and appreciation and that of all our future generations."- (http://dli.iiit.ac.in/)


The site also claims in it's Vision, "The technological advances today make it possible to think in terms of storing all the knowledge of the human race in digital form by the year 2008."

Although technology has far exceeded anyone's expectations and numbers surpass those which were hypothesized, a independent storage site that has managed to gather and store "all the knowledge of the human race in digital form" still fails to exist. Even in 2010.


The NEW DLI

The "new" Digital Library site is located at: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/

I did a few searches for materials on both sites. The original site came back with no hits or hits unrelated to my search. The "new" cite was able to locate the books I searched for.
For ex: "The Catcher in the Rye" returned information about the book, author, copy write date and allowed the book to be read in 2 parts. For my computer, it opened the digital text in Quick Time....though I am sure if the proper setup's were installed the book would open in a "reader-friendly" format.

Both sites also contain information about digital rights management and copy write privileges. I intend to look into this more because it is baffling to me that a site like this exists!