Address At The Dedication Of State-Of-The-Art Digital Mobile Lab For Preservation Of Heritage Manuscripts, Bangalore

Digital Library and its Multidimensions

I am indeed delighted to participate in the dedication of digital mobile lab for preservation of heritage manuscripts organized by Mahabharatha Samshodhana Pratisthanam. My greetings to the organizers, all the team members in the digitization and the knowledge business, library and information science professionals.

This digital mobile lab for manuscripts and heritage uses various cutting edge technologies to give a complete end-to-end solution for the holistic process of restoring manuscripts. It integrates the space communications, digital imaging and chemical engineering technologies to achieve the task of documentation, conservation, digitization and dissemination of the manuscripts of our country, wherever they are. Once a custodian institution/repository is identified it would record global positioning data and creates the digital manuscript map of India. The surveyed manuscripts are subject to chemical conservation to defumigate the manuscripts. Subsequently, manuscripts are deciphered and digitized using special scanning station called 'Vyasa'.

The mobile digital library can become a partner of the Digital Library of India portal. Sharing of digital content with no barriers will truly speak of the technology as an integrator of people. I would like to talk to this audience on "Digital library and its Multi-dimensions".

Core competence for Knowledge Society

Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. A knowledge society is one of the basic foundations for the development of any nation. Knowledge has many forms and it is available at many places. The acquisition of knowledge has therefore been the thrust area throughout the world and sharing the experience of knowledge is a unique culture of our country. Digital Library is a new instrument, which can spread the knowledge nearly at the speed of light. India is a nation endowed with natural and competitive advantages as also certain distinctive competencies. But these are scattered in isolated pockets and the awareness on these is inadequate. During the last few centuries the world has undergone a change from agriculture society, where natural labour was the critical factor, to industrial society where the management of technology, capital and labour provided the competitive advantage. In the 21st century, a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. Efficient utilisation of existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth for the nation in the form of better health, education, infrastructure etc. for improving the quality of life. Ability to create and maintain the knowledge infrastructure, develop knowledge workers and enhance their productivity through creation, growth and use of new knowledge will be the key factors in deciding the prosperity of this Knowledge Society. Whether a nation has emerged as a knowledge society or not is judged by the way the country effectively deals with knowledge creation and knowledge deployment.

Knowledge Management

The systematic process of finding, selecting, organizing, distilling and presenting information, improves an employee's comprehension in a specific area of interest. Knowledge management helps an organization to gain insight and understanding from its own experience. Specific knowledge management activities help focus the organization on acquiring, storing and utilizing knowledge for problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning and decision making. It also prevents intellectual assets from decay, adds to firm intelligence and provides increased flexibility.

Knowledge creation has two dimensions, one is explicit knowledge and the other one is implicit knowledge. The explicit knowledge comes from published books, written materials, proceedings, presentations etc., whereas the implicit knowledge is derived through the systematic observation and capturing of data from the tacit knowledge available among the individuals in the organization, through their approach to problem solving, bottle-neck removal, goals setting, interactions etc. We need a systematic mechanism to capture this knowledge to make the organization a truly learning organization which makes use of existing knowledge judiciously and efficiently.

Digital mobile library is an important component for capturing the explicit knowledge. This has to be supplemented with the implicit knowledge to the digital library system, which will eventually get transformed into a knowledge management system. Let us study how the digital mobile library influences knowledge management in India through research, design and development. This may be relevant to other countries also. I am happy that the Digital Mobile Lab has used the current technology to preserve the manuscripts of rare Indian heritage and also created a digital storage system through a special scanner. Instead of the manuscript being moved to a central place with the associated risk of the manuscript being damaged the mobile lab will reach the place where the manuscript is stored and capture the information in situ. This technique is definitely laudable and will ensure that all the people holding the manuscript will cooperate because they do not have to move to any place for offering the document.

Digital library initiatives in India

There is a mission of Digital library web portal to create a portal for digital library of India piloted by the Ministry of Information Technology (MIT) with IISc and Carnegie Mellon University as partners for fostering creativity and free access to all human knowledge. This digital library as a first step will create a free-to-read searchable collection of one million books by 2005 in India. This library was launched in 2003. Prof.N Balakrishnan, Chief Coordinator of Digital Library of India informs me that, so far 20 centers are operational throughout the country, over 1,50,000 books have been digitized of which nearly 50,000 are in 9 Indian languages. In the library of Rashtrapati Bhavan, which is part of the Digital Library of India, we have so far digitized over ten million pages and also we are digitizing our old official records leading to e-governance implementation. The data will be available for use by different institutions in the country and abroad, depending upon their needs. The programme is progressing in the right direction. I would suggest Mahabharata Samshodhana Pratisthanam can become a partner of the digital library programme and disseminate the collected information by the digital mobile laboratory among the various enlightened users of the country.

Digital Libraries are not the Digital Equivalents of the present day library. They would include, besides the books, manuscripts and journals, information and our heritage in all other forms including speech, folk songs, paintings and carvings. It is important that we take on this mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our Digital Library.

Traditional System storage: India has rich information relating to literature, music, traditional system of medicine and science embedded in palm leaves. It is necessary to search, understand and preserve this valuable information. Merely scanning the palm leaves would not be very useful. The number of people who can read the palm leaves and interpret the meanings, identify the plants and stones mentioned in the palm leaves is dwindling. Even those few who can read, cannot write very well, that too may not be fluent in entering into the computer in Digital Forms. The Optical Character Recognition of these ancient scripts is also a very tough problem, almost intractable technically. I suggest that for every palm leaf scanned, we record in audio the information read by the experts. We can then put these on the web and invite other experts to provide free and fair commentary and validate every palm leaf data. This data can also be used for creating a new generation of palm leaves reading experts - a species that has almost vanished.

Conclusion

Digitisation of old manuscripts is a national mission. We should see that all the schools, colleges, and universities digitize their libraries in their own native languages and connect to the outside world within the next 4 years. We have to ensure availability of fiber optic cables, satellite communication and wireless infrastructure especially in remote areas. It is also essential to realize high bandwidth technology like Multiple 10 Giga Bits connectivity across the country. This will ensure dissemination of information contained in the rare manuscripts to all the remote areas of the country without any distortion.

I dedicate the Digital Mobile Lab for preservation of Heritage manuscripts to the nation and wish the members of Mahabharatha Samshodhana Pratisthanam success in their mission of using technology for preserving and disseminating Indian cultural heritage to all the citizens particularly the researchers.

May God bless you.