A million rare manuscripts, palm leaves, copper plates and age-old classical literature are to be digitised under a project jointly undertaken by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Indian ministry of communications and information technology. CMU will provide proprietary software and hardware to the Digital Library of India (DLI) for $5 million. "In collaboration with the SV Digital Library (SVDL) of the Tirumula Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD), we have started scanning as many manuscripts, palm leaves and age-old books to host them on our portals in digitised form," CMU director Kiran Kumar told IANS. "We have scanned about 130,000 documents from 31 digital centres across the country. The target is to reach about a million mark by 2008 so as to preserve our rich cultural heritage for posterity," he added. Using the latest technology, the DLI has also roped in academic experts to translate and document the hoary literary material from 14 digital centres in southern India and upload it on its web sites for browsing by the public free of cost.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/06/2005 09:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
