Speaking to Bar & Bench on the move, Vice-Chancellor Prof Sudhir Krishnaswamy said,
“There are two issues primarily – for students with disabilities, especially visual disability and locomotor disabilities, access to books has always been a problem. We have been making some partial arrangements depending on their request for research, to make some scans and share with them – that was a piecemeal approach. Then when the pandemic broke out, it was not only students with disabilities, but all students who needed access. Then we realised the way forward, and most students these days prefer to read material off their devices. So we decided to adopt a full-fledged digitization strategy for the library.”
On the different steps involved in this process, Prof Kishnaswamy said,
“There are many ingredients to the process – one of it is to scan the books, for which we are using a high-end technology to ensure precision and quality work. After scanning, the books also need to be processed. We need to put in place Optical Character Recognition (OCR), searchability as also the platform on which they will be hosted. That software element has also been put in place – so that we can follow a careful, copyright-compliant digital rights management (DRM) system. The entire process should be done in the next 12-18 months.”
Source: Barandbench
