Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) has launched an ambitious project to digitize the research material in its possession. Under this project, the goal is to ensure the conversion of the entire India House Collection of the Library consisting of 40,000 books, reports, periodicals (containing around 70,00,000 pages), 55,00,000 pages of archival documents, and of 30,000 microfilms and 57,000 microfiches (consisting of approximately 2.5 crore images) to digital form.
In order to make all the digitized materials accessible from any part of the world, it has been decided to put them on Internet through a state-of-the-art digital platform, Open Digital Library and Archives (ODLA) which will allow researchers on modern and contemporary India to search for documents relevant for their research, preview them, and download them after paying service charges. This will greatly facilitate academic research and dissemination of knowledge about modern and contemporary India especially that based on archival sources as well as newspapers and journals, of which NMML is the largest repository in the country. The ODLA is likely to be developed by Tata Consultancy Services in collaboration with NMML. It is likely to become operational in the next six months.
The digitization project is being implemented with the help of three outsourced agencies which are working on the digitization of India House Collection, the archival papers, and the microfilms and microfiches. In order to ensure the safety of records and authentication of scanned images, NMML staff is working on the project in collaboration with the outsourced agencies. This will also help the staff acquire necessary skills for digitization, so that over the long term the work can be done in house. The cost of the project is approximately 7 crore rupees, and the timeline for completion is approximately 12 months.
Approximately 17,00,000 pages of archival documents, 2,50,000 photographs, rare books, NMML publications, around 3,50,000 newspaper pages and 6000 hours of Oral History recordings digitized earlier are available in the Library on intranet. Users can read them on computer and download on payment basis.
