Digital Library Initiatives in India: A Comprehensive Study

TL;DR

This paper surveys Indian digital library initiatives, revealing many are still in early stages with issues like poor search interfaces, lack of standards, and limited remote access, but show promise in government digital governance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of Indian digital libraries, highlighting their current challenges and offering policy suggestions for improvement.

Findings

Most digital libraries are in nascent stages.

Many lack proper search interfaces and standards.

Government digital libraries have higher usage statistics.

Abstract

This study is a survey of digital library initiatives in India collecting secondary information from about fifty digital libraries from their respective websites. The findings show that in most cases the actual conception of the digital library is still in a nascent stage. Online subscriptions and links to third-party websites are also considered digital libraries. However, many digital libraries do have not any proper search interface on their respective website due to improper arrangement of metadata. In some cases, they do not have their own digitized collection and provided other collections or referred to their users to some third-party website. Moreover, there are many digital libraries that cannot be accessed outside (remote access) of the organization. Hence, regular website maintenance, remote access facility, and proper training of information professionals are required. Moreover, the so-called digital libraries in India have not developed their own standards or are not following any global standards. However, the usage statistics for government digital libraries are far better than the usage statistics of academic or public libraries. Users are perhaps more interested in government rules, laws, orders, etc. That is perhaps a positive sign of digital governance and reaching the public. There are several important observations and policy suggestions that may be helpful for students, scholars, library professionals, and the decision-makers in the government.