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About Us |
Vision
Existing archives of paper have many shortcomings. Many other works still in existence today are rare, and only accessible to a small population of scholars and collectors at specific geographic locations. A single wanton act of destruction can destroy an entire line of heritage. Furthermore, contrary to the popular beliefs, the libraries, museums, and publishers do not routinely maintain broadly comprehensive archives of the considered works of man. No one can afford to do this, unless the archive is digital.
Digital technology can make the works of man permanently accessible to the billions of people all over the world. Andrew Carnegie and other great philanthropists in past centuries have recognized the great potential of llibraries to improve the quality of life and provide opportunity to the citizenry. A digital library, widely available through free access on the Internet, will improve the global society in ways beyond measurement. The Internet can house a Universal Library that is free to the people.
Mission
The mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.
One of the goals of the Universal Library is to provide support for full text indexing and searching based on OCR (optical character recognition) technologies where available. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student's success in their research endeavors. This 24x7 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for language processing research in areas such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information retrieval.
It is our expectation that the Universal Library will be mirrored at several locations worldwide so as to protect the integrity and availability of the data. Several models for sustainability are being explored. Usability studies would also be conducted to ensure that the materials are easy to locate, navigate, and use. Appropriate metadata for navigation and management would also be created.
Goal
The primary long-term objective is to capture all books in digital format. It is believed that such a task is impossible and could take hundreds of years, and never be completed. Thus, a first step was to demonstrate the feasibility by undertaking to digitize all the out of copy-right books available in the St Stephen's College Library . This portal was developed with the follwoing objectives a) Develop a mechanism for collection, storage, and preservation of relevant study materials for students and teachers (b) bring together significant resources for education and research on a single platform for easy access to various study materials like course material, question papers, syllabus, college magazine, research papers etc. (c) facilitate easy availability of content to the student and teacher community encouraging interdisciplinary and cross campus learning and research (d) enable both the student and teacher communities to share scholarly information.
Benefits
A secondary benefit of online search is to make locating the relevant information inside of books far more reliable and much easier. Student success in finding exactly what they seek will increase and increased success will enhance student willingness to perform research using this large resource. NCES reports that 84 percent of libraries around the country are open between 60 and 80 hours a week. This digital library would be open all the 168 hours the week on a 24x7x365 basis. More than one individual will be able to use the same book at the same time. Thus, popular works will not be checked out and thus unavailable to others.
This project will produce an extensive and rich test bed for use in further textual language processing research. Project was started to target the 2000 out - of copyright books and make available the question paper, syllabi, videos and research paper written by faculty memebrs etc. on the Intranet of University of Delhi.
Many believe that information is now doubling every two years. Machine summarization, intelligent indexing, and information mining are tools that will be needed for individuals to keep up in their discipline work, in their businesses, and in their personal interests. This large project will enable undergraduate studnets to find the revelent information expediately.
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