National Digital Library of India (NDLI) is a National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) Project developed by the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT KGP), under the aegis of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt. of India. It is a single-window platform providing learning resources that make e-Learning and education accessible to all, bringing to users of all demographics, digital repositories from India and the world.
Background
editNDLI is a central government project under the Ministry of Human Resource Development that aims to collect and collate metadata and provide a full-text index from several national and international digital libraries, as well as other relevant sources. It also functions as a digital repository of textbooks, articles, videos, audiobooks, lectures, simulations, etc. The huge resource, it contains, can be useful to enrich Wikimedia projects in various ways. Also, integrating Wikisource and Wikidata contents into NDLI websites will bring more visibility and attention to the projects
Initial collaboration
editThe meetings were organized by NDLI and held at IIT Kharagpur on 9 September 2019 and IIT New Delhi on 8 December 2019.
First meeting
editOn 9th September 2019, a meeting with the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. From NDLI, Dr. Partha Pratim Das, Joint Principal Investigator; Dr Plaban Kumar Bhowmick, Co-Principal Investigator and Nanda Gopal Chattopadhyay, CTO and from CIS-A2K, I and Bodhisattwa attended the meeting.
The broad agenda of the meeting was how to move forward in successfully integrate Wikisource and Wikidata into the NDLI website.
We discussed signing a Memorandum of Understanding among NDLI, CIS-A2K and WMF representatives. It has been agreed to prepare the MoU as soon as possible without any bureaucratic delays.
We discussed the technical issues which might create a hindrance to this future endeavour. For example, we discussed the possibilities on how to automatically update the NDLI website if Wikidata and Wikisource contents get updated, for example, using Mediawiki API, or SPARQL endpoints in real-time or searching for any other incremental way of harvesting.
NDLI team also stressed having a catalogue of books according to subjects in Wikisource. We discussed the volunteer dynamics and community autonomy in dealing with such matters. We promised to build such a catalogue at least for Bengali Wikisource on a priority basis.
Dr Das discussed possible outreach collaboration with Wikimedia world by different means, for example, publishing articles on the collaborations and Wikimedia activities in the NDLI newsletter or promote target-oriented contribution in their future NDLI clubs or participating and involving partner organizations in events having a common cause.
Dr Das also discussed crowdsourcing in data curation. We discussed if it is possible to have edit buttons on the NDLI website which can directly lead viewers to edit in Wikidata. As people can only view NDLI contents if they log in, we talked about if an OAuth application can be created to log in once in the NDLI website and edit in Wikimedia sites.
We also talked about getting data bi-directional way, so that apart from data harvesting from Wikimedia sites in the NDLI website, NDLI data can also be included in Wikidata and if possible, Wikisource. NDLI team also thought about the possibilities of linking everything in their metadata section with Wikidata.
We also discussed creating a better communication channel that may be in Slack, Telegram or Whatsapp etc, so that we can coordinate closely and discuss and resolve any possible issues we may face during our collaboration.
Dr Plaban Kr. Bhowmick discussed involving IIT students and researchers in core and other development of Wikidata, participating in hackathons and GSoC concerning Wikimedia. He is going to send a proposal regarding his plans and we discussed the next steps to work on it.
Final Meeting & MoU sign
editThe final meeting was held in IIT Delhi between the Wikimedia Foundation, CIS-A2K and NDLI team in February 2020. Later in March 2020 final Memorandum of Understanding was signed.
Implementation
editPublished book
editAs on 31st December 2021
| Language | Number of Book |
|---|---|
| Old English | 1 |
| Bengali | 154 |
| Braj | 1 |
| Czech | 2 |
| Mandarin | 1 |
| English | 970 |
| French | 3 |
| Ancient Greek | 1 |
| Italian | 1 |
| Jamaikan | 1 |
| Kannada | 19 |
| Latin | 2 |
| Marathi | 1 |
| Punjabi | 1 |
| Sanskrit | 1 |
| Tai | 1 |
| 1160 |