About National Science Digital Library

Information being an essential input for R&D, a strong base and efficient dissemination with a wide coverage of disciplines and users, is essential for dynamic research and development in the country. NISCAIR has been playing an important role in science communication and information dissemination at a national level for the last several decades. The NISCAIR houses the National Science Library which is storehouse of over 1, 50, 000 monographs, books and periodicals in the field of science and technology

Although NISCAIR has for been providing information services to the R&D community, it was felt that information resources required by the students of science, particularly at the undergraduate level are not easily and equitably available in digital form. This led to the conceptualization of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) to cater to the information requirement of students at the undergraduate level. A proposal submitted to the CSIR under the Tenth Five Year Plan for the establishment of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) at NISCAIR was approved with a budget outlay of Rs. 44.5 crores in the year 2002.

Objectives of NSDL

· To create an open, distributed, publicly accessible digital library in areas of science and technology.

· To facilitate access to students of science & technology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Scope of NSDL

National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is envisaged as first of its kind to benefit the students at undergraduate level in Indian universities and colleges by providing Internet access to digital resources of curriculum related material in science and technology.

There are about 16,000 publishers in India who are publishing 70,000 titles out of which 28,000 titles are in English which include books, reference books, general books, guidebooks, competition papers, examination papers, etc. However, curriculum based focused content is not easily available to the students leaving a gap in the information needs of the student community.

To bridge this gap, NSDL embarked upon to create original and targeted contents by identified panels of experts/authors for about 1000 e-books targeting the undergraduate level by the end of the Plan Period 2006-2007.

NSDL Philosophy

The open source movement is driving the emerging knowledge society that is aimed at making information resources being freely available and such freely available information resources are being stored and managed on open source technology oriented platforms. NSDL envisages making available high quality contents through the open source technology platforms.

Technology framework

Keeping the open source philosophy in view and after studied consideration NSDL selected, DSpace the open source software for the digital library.

Content Creation

The content creation and development for NSDL has gone through rigorous procedures to make available quality content for the students. Authored by eminent teachers and validated by renowned faculty in Indian universities and colleges, NSDL has the finest contents.

The content creation workflow is as follows:

Formatting