Vidyanidhi

Vidyanidhi, India's first 'doctoral' portal offers a multilingual database of research papers
"Vidyanidhi is an initiative based at the University of Mysore that promotes doctoral theses and provides higher visibility to Indian research via an online digital library. The Vidyanidhi database is the first such online initiative in India which contains bibliographic descriptions and provides full text theses on the Web. Vidyanidhi is funded by National Information System for Science & Technology (NISSAT), GOI and the Ford Foundation to create this online library. Upon research, the team found that as many as 20% - 25% of the theses is written in Indian regional languages. Therefore, the online database had to support multiple languages. Vidyanidhi decided to build the database on the Microsoft platform utilizing its local language support built into the products. Today, Vidyanidhi offers doctoral theses in Hindi, Kannada and English and multi-lingual searches. It is establishing itself as the portal of choice for researchers across the country with over 64,000 theses online. Other Indian regional languages are in the pipeline. This will help attain the global exposure for Indian research, a key objective of Vidyanidhi".
Situation
India does not have a central repository in which theses are stored from various PhDs across different disciplines. This has led to various kinds of problems from lack of visibility for Indian research to duplication, repitition and even plagarism in some cases. Most countries have created an online central database where universitites as well as researchers post their theses and dissertations. With the proliferation of the Web, this has become a global showcase of research capabilities of each country.
"Investment on Indian Doctoral research is worth over Rs 3000 crore with about 30,000 theses written each year. Our goal was to create a multilingual, central repository that would be available to all over the Web. Microsoft technologies support local Indian languages, which led us to choose Windows Server System to store and manage the data." Dr. Shalini Urs Project Director, Vidyanidhi	In a similar thought process, Vidyanidhi Digital Library (VDL) was conceived in 1999. The objective was to create a online theses resource for India. This would be the central location for where students wouls submit their theses online. It would also serve as an archive of e-Theses in India which could be accessed over the Web. In 2000, financial support for a pilot project were approved by Information System for Science and Technology (NISSAT), Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India.
While conducting a feasibility study of an e-Theses program in India, the Vidyanidhi team realized that as many as 20% - 25% of the theses were written in local Indian languages. "Since a large portion of the theses are written in languages other than English, the portal would not be an authentic source of Indian theses without local language support. At this juncture we decided to implement a technical solution that would encompass Indian regional languages as well", explains Dr. Shalini Urs, Project Director, Vidyanidhi. The Vidyanidhi team also garnered assistance from the Ford Foundation to eveolve VDL into a national repository of e-Theses through partnership with universities, academic institutions and individuals. Online submissions on Vidyanidhi Website can be made at two levels i.e. metadata, an abstract of the theses; or full text of the theses. At the university and institutional level, the participation is being formalised through Memorandums of Understanding (MoU). As more and more individuals, universities and institutions become a part of this consortium, Vidyanidhi will come closer to achieveing its goal of becoming a national repository of Indian e-Theses.
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE Vidyanidhi uses Microsoft Small Business Server to store, search and access multilingual data
Solution
Selecting the right technology platform Vidyanidhi chose Microsoft technologies due to the ease with which we could implement local language support. "No other technology vendor was able to offer the number of languages or the ease of integration,"explains Dr. Shalini Urs. "Also, Microsoft offered to provide technical support to deploy the solution as well,"she adds.
Solution Overview A prototype of a digital library of e-Theses was developed and the same was hosted on the Microsoft Small Business Server 2000. The Web server was deployed using Windows Server 2000 and Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0. VDL has two main components: a theses database; and (Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD), the full text collection. These have been created using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and ASP. The site has currently implemented Unicode to support Kannada and Hindi. In the future, the organization plans to implement support for Tamil, Telugu and Marathi, which is currently under development) Solution Approach & Implementation The content for both the metadata and the full text is procured using a multi-pronged strategy. Metadata is collated from the university news bulletins, partnering universities and institutions, as well as from individual researchers and the faculty. The full text is procured through partnering agencies or individual researchers. The full text is often not available in electronic format. In such a case the printed theses is scanned, OCRed, edited, and converted into individual chapters in PDF. A 'Table of Contents&' in created in HTML and linking to each chapter of the theses. Full text which is available in digital form is converted to PDF and XML. The VDL has been implemented on a home grown solution. This has many modules and layers to meet the demands of a multi institutional and multilingual digital library. The multilingual access has been created by using Unicode. The database is created using Unicode standards and the metadata is input in local language in a data entry form created using HTML and ASP on the Windows XP platform. A similar process is followed for search as well.
UNICODE IMPLEMENTATION While Office XP users can view data in any language, other platforms require a Unicode implementation to view data. Vidyanidhi DLL module addresses this
End users who are on the Windows XP platform can view output in any Indian language. However, to view the information on non-Unicode desktops (older versions of Windows, Linux etc.) required some development effort from Vidyanidhi team. It has developed a DLL to display results in Kannada using the Akrutikannada Padmini font. For local language support, the solution creates two records, the first is in the Indian language. A transliteration module converts this record into Roman script, which is stored as the second record.
Benefits
The Vidyanidhi Digital Library is partnering with universities across the country. Today, it has over 70,000 records in the database. First ever multilingual portal for Indian theses Vidyanidhi is the Indian e-Theses database, which has records of bibliographic descriptions of theses and full text theses. Currently, Vidyanidhi has partnered with University of Hyderabad, Jadavpur University, Aligarh Muslim University, and Pune University and is well on its way to become the definitive source for Indian theses and dissertations. Facilitates complex multilingual searches Vidyanidhi provides multilingual search capabilities in two Indian Languages i.e. Kannada and Hindi. As and when new languages are added, search will be available in those languages as well. It also offers advanced search capabilities to search for bibliographic contents in a particular field.
MULTILINGUAL SEARCH VDL can be searched in Hindi, English or Kannada
Remotely upload theses
Vidyanidhi facilitates PhD students, scholars and university personnel to submit bibliographic contents of thesis from their desktops.
University partners get a homepage
In addition to multilingual database and search, the partner organizations get some exclusive services. These include a personalized homepage with access control rights. Apart from this the institute can search as well as get an alphabetical listing of all dissertations submitted by it.
An interview with Prof Shalini Urs