Digitized materials to be placed on the Internet through the state-of-the-art digital platform Open Digital Library and Archives (ODLA)
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) has embarked on an ambitious project to digitize the research material in its possession. Under this project, the aim is to ensure the conversion of the entire India House Library collection consisting of 40,000 books, reports, periodicals (comprising around 70,00,000 pages), 55,00,000 pages of archival documents and 30,000 microfilms and 57,000 microfiche (consisting of approx. 2.5 million images) into digital form.
To make all the digitized materials accessible from any part of the world, it has been decided to put them on the Internet through the state-of-the-art digital platform Open Digital Library and Archives (ODLA), which will enable researchers modern and contemporary India to find documents relevant to their research, view them and download them after payment of service fees. This will greatly facilitate academic research and dissemination of knowledge on modern and contemporary India, especially that based on archival sources as well as newspapers and magazines of which NMML is the largest repository in the country. ODLA is likely to be developed by Tata Consultancy Services in collaboration with NMML. It is likely to be commissioned within the next six months.
The digitization project is being implemented with the help of three external agencies that are working to digitize the India House Collection, archival documents and microfilm and microfiche. To ensure the security of records and authentication of scanned images, NMML staff are working on the project in collaboration with external agencies. This will also help employees acquire the necessary digitization skills so that work can be done at home in the long term. The cost of the project is around 7 million rupees and the completion date is around 12 months.
About 17,00,000 pages of archival documents, 2,50,000 photographs, rare books, NMML publications, about 3,50,000 newspaper pages and 6,000 hours of oral history recordings digitized earlier are available in the library on the intranet. Users can read them on their computer and download them on a payment basis.
