National Digital Library

[Ardelle Abdullah]

Thepurpose of this meeting is to discuss a question of vital importance to the cultural life of our country: Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

I realize that intellectual property is a complex subject. Instead of raising the vexed question of copyright at this stage, I want to make a different point, one that has to do with the principles behind the founding of our country.

Of course, literacy was limited in the eighteenth century, and those who could read had limited access to books. There was an enormous gap between the hard realities of life two centuries ago and the ideals of the Founding Fathers. You could therefore accuse the Founders of utopianism. For my part, I believe that a strong dose of utopian idealism gave their thought its driving force. I think we should tap that force today, because what seemed utopian in the eighteenth century has now become possible. We can close the gap between the high ground of principle and the hardscrabble of everyday life. We can do so by creating a National Digital Library.

The National Digital library of India is a virtual repository of learning resources which is not just a repository with a search/browse facilities but also provides a host of services including textbooks, articles, videos, audiobooks, lectures, simulations, fiction, and all other kinds of learning media for the learners/users community. It is a project under Ministry of Education, Government of India, through its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT). The objective is to collect and collate metadata and provide full text index from several national and international digital libraries, as well as other relevant sources. The NDLI provides free of cost access to many books and designed to hold content of any languages and provides interface support for 10 most widely used Indian languages. It is developed, operated and maintained by the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.[1]

The scanning of Indian language books has led to the development of Indian language optical character recognition (OCR) software. The National Digital Library of India (NDLI) is a digital repository comprising textbooks, articles, videos, audio books, lectures, simulations, fiction and all other kinds of learning media. The NDLI provides free access to many books in the Indian languages and English.

User registration is open to users from around the world. However, contents from some popular sources are only accessible to registered users. Some of these registration-only works are from sources such as:

The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is a project by the United States Library of Congress to assemble a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. The NDLP brought online 24 million books and documents from the Library of Congress and other research institutions.[1]

Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's history. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a range of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.

The reproductions were produced with a variety of tools: image scanners, digital cameras, devices that digitize audio and video, and human labor for rekeying and encoding texts. American Memory employs national-standard and well established industry-standard formats for many digital reproductions, e.g., texts encoded with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and images stored in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) files or compressed with the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) algorithm. In other cases, the lack of well established standards has led to the use of emerging formats, e.g., RealAudio (for audio), QuickTime (for moving images), and MrSID (for maps). Technical information by types of material and by individual collections is also available on the site.[2]

Museums and libraries play a key role in providing and preserving access to digital information. Library users download eBooks, museum visitors view digitally preserved versions of ancient manuscripts, and scholars scour thousands of documents stored in vast library databases. Free broadband in libraries helps rural and remote communities tap into these treasures as well.

IMLS supports the development of eBooks to expand access to literature and encourage reading. The Open eBook initiative provides low-income children with free access to popular eBooks through a digital application. The Library Simplified project lowers barriers to library use and collections through a SimplyE reader.

In furtherance of the President's Management Agenda, NSF has identified programs that will offer proposers the option to utilize Grants.gov to prepare and submit proposals, or will require that proposers utilize Grants.gov to prepare and submit proposals. Grants.gov provides a single Government-wide portal for finding and applying for Federal grants online.

In response to this program solicitation, proposers may opt to submit proposals via Grants.gov or via the NSF FastLane system. In determining which method to utilize in the electronic preparation and submission of the proposal, please note the following:

Collaborative Proposals. All collaborative proposals submitted as separate submissions from multiple organizations must be submitted via the NSF FastLane system. Chapter II, Section D.3 of the Grant Proposal Guide provides additional information on collaborative proposals.

In FY2007 the NSDL program will accept two types of proposals: 1) From the current set of three tracks, Pathways, Services, and Targeted Research, the program will accept proposals only in the Pathways track and specific components of the Services track. 2) Proposals for small grants that extend or enhance efforts supported by awards from all tracks within the NSDL program will also be accepted. See the full text of this solicitation for more details.

Building on work supported under the multi-agency Digital Libraries Initiative, this program aims to establish a national digital library that will constitute an online network of learning environments and resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels. The program has three tracks: (1) Pathways projects are expected to provide stewardship for the content and services needed by major communities of learners. (2) Services projects are expected to develop services that support users, resource collection providers, and the Core Integration effort and that enhance the impact, efficiency, and value of the library. (3) Targeted Research projects are expected to explore specific topics that have immediate applicability to collections, services, and other aspects of the development of the digital library. In FY2007 the program will only accept proposals in the Pathways track and specific components of the Services track. The program will also accept proposals for small grants that extend or enhance results from existing services, collections, or targeted research activity so as to enlarge the user audience for NSDL or improve capabilities for the user.

Organization Limit: None SpecifiedPI Limit: None Specified Limit on Number of Proposals per Organization: None Specified Limit on Number of Proposals per PI: An individual may serve as the Principal Investigator (PI) on no more than one proposal, including collaborative proposals, submitted in the FY2007 competition, but may serve as a co-PI on multiple proposals.Proposal Preparation and Submission InstructionsA. Proposal Preparation Instructions

Full Proposals submitted via FastLane: NSF Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide, Part I: Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) Guidelines apply. The complete text of the GPG is available electronically on the NSF website at: _summ.jsp?ods_key=gpg.

Full Proposals submitted via Grants.gov: NSF Grants.gov Application Guide: A Guide for the Preparation and Submission of NSF Applications via Grants.gov Guidelines apply (Note: The NSF Grants.gov Application Guide is available on the Grants.gov website and on the NSF website at: )

The goal of the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) program is to create, develop, and sustain a national digital library supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Collectively, its projects form a network of STEM learning environments and resources. The resulting digital library is intended ultimately to meet the needs of students and teachers at all levels -- pre-K to 12, undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong learning. It will serve both the individual learner seeking understanding and groups of learners engaged in collaborative exploration of concepts; and it will support formal and informal modes of learning.

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