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Chowdhury, G. (2001) How to make best use of the intellectual output of a country? a simple
approach to the design of a digital library of theses and dissertations in Indian universities. In: 8th
national conference for automation of libraries in education and research institutes, 2001-03-15 -
2001-03-16, Pune.
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How to Make Best Use of the Intellectual Output of the Country?
A Simple Approach to the Design of a Digital Library
of Theses and Dissertations in Indian Universities
Dr. Gobinda G. Chowdhury
Department of Information Science
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow G1 1XH, UK
e-mail: gobinda@dis.strath.ac.uk

Introduction
Research and development activities in digital libraries are less than a decade old and
virtually large-scale systematic research in digital libraries began with the Digital Libray
Research Initiatives in the US in 1994 [1,2] and the Electronic Libraries programme (eLib) in
UK in 1995 [3]. Nevertheless, Digital Library Initiative Phase 1 and Phase 2 [1,2] projects in
the US and eLib phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3 projects [3] in UK have played a key role in
digital library developments. At the moment there are many on-going digital library projects
in different parts of the world and features of many of these have appeared in the literature
(see for example, [4,5,6]). These digital library research projects introduced many research
issues such as collection development and management, information format, organization,
storage, retrieval, search features, display format, user interface, networking, and so on.
Advances in network technology, image-processing software, multimedia software coupled
with telecommunication technology have improved the various collections of digital libraries
in various forms and formats. Some digital libraries have special collections such as multi-
media documents, audio, video, images, photographs, maps; while others have combination
of general and special collections in digital and print form.

While library automation and Online public Access Catalogues (OPACs) are slowly taking
place, digital library research and development activities are at a very preliminary stage in
India. Nevertheless, various institutions, especially the universities and other academic
institutions in the country have rich resources that can be shared and put to optimum use
through digital libraries. In this paper I shall talk about a rather down-to-earth approach to
building digital libraries, primarily for the benefit of the academic and research community,
but largely for all categories of users in India. Universities and institutions of higher education
form the major category of users of digital libraries. In India there are hundreds of
universities and other academic institutions catering for the needs of millions of users.
INFLIBNET is in an excellent position to spearhead in building such digital libraries, and in
this paper I would like to propose some simple guidelines for this.

How Should INFLIBNET Go About Building DLs

Traditional libraries will exist side by side the new and upcoming digital libraries, at least for
the foreseeable future. Therefore what we will have are hybrid libraries, a combination of
traditional and digital libraries [7,8]. Such hybrid libraries will be extremely useful in
developing countries like India, where the objective should be to build digital libraries in
niche areas to compliment the traditional library services. External digital library services can
be obtained in a number of ways, through subscription, such as through the ACM digital
library (http://www.acm.org/dl), or for free such as the NDLTD (http://ww.ndltd.org).
Libraries can also provide access to various electronic journals and databases by agreement
through the publishers or aggregators/vendors such as the Academic Press

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(http://www.idealibrary.com) , EBSCO Online (http://www-
sg.ebsco.com/home/default.asp), Ovid online (http://www.ovid.com), and so on, or can
provide access to full-text information resources through information services like ProQuest
(http://www.umi.com/proquest/). Nevertheless, the country’s own resources cannot be
accessed and utilized unless a digital library of such resources are built and maintained. There
are several areas where such digital libraries can be built, but to my knowledge and
understanding the first and foremost objective should be to build a digital library of theses and
dissertations. The reasons are obvious. Thousands of theses and postgraduate dissertations
produced in Indian Universities and other Institutions for higher learning contain tremendous
amount of intellectual contents. These are the products of the intellectual output of the
country in many different areas that can not only benefit the academic and research but also
can be useful to the government and the commercial world. It is for this reason theses and
dissertations have got special priorities in forming the contents of many digital libraries, such
as NDLTD(http://www.ndltd.org) and NCSTRL (http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu/), etc.

There are different ways INFLIBNET, or any other organization, can go about building a DL
of theses and dissertations produced in Indian Universities and other institutions. This paper
provides some simple guidelines, that may be easily applied to build DLs on a failsafe basis.
The DL of theses and dissertations has to be backed up by a good Document Delivery
Service, and fortunately INFLIBNET already has such a service in place
(http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/).

Design of a DL of Theses and Dissertations

Theses and dissertations contain the intellectual output of sincere and systematic research
carried out by researchers, and monitored as well as reviewed by peers including supervisors
and other experts such as examiners, reviewers and editors of journals, when papers are
published reporting the research results, and so on. Hence, it is essential that such intellectual
output is properly recorded and made available to others in the country and abroad. Several
digital libraries have been built throughout the world that provide access to electronic theses
and dissertations. Notable examples of digital libraries of theses and dissertations include:
NDLTD (http://www.ndltd.org) and NCSTRL (http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu/).

DL of Theses and Dissertations in Indian Universities: A Simple Design Approach

One of the most prominent examples of a digital library of theses and dissertations is
NDLTD. It is a project initiated and headed by Prof. Edward Fox at Virginia Tech., USA. It
is a Federation of Universities and other academic institutions in the US and other parts of the
world that have agreed to make their theses and dissertations available in electronic format.
While many of the theses and dissertations are available for free, some have restricted access.
Any institution can become a member of the Federation, though there are principles to be
agreed upon and documents to be signed. While some universities in India can go
individually to join such a federation, it may be more appropriate and prudent to build a DL
of theses and dissertations in India itself that can be managed easily and can be accessed by
national as well as international users, subject to access management principles.

Building a DL containing abstracts of theses and dissertations

Building a digital library of all the theses and dissertations produced at all the Indian
Universities and Institutions of Higher learning over the past years (with a cut-off point of,
say ten years or so) will no doubt be a massive work. It needs a lot of resources –
computational, as well as financial and others. Instead of trying to build one with all the
sophisticated features, it is better to take a stage-by-stage approach. In this paper, I would like
to propose a simple and failsafe approach; the guidelines are not perfect, and obviously are
subject to discussions and modifications, but they would certainly form the foundation.

2
Stage One
This stage involves some basic and yet very important and critical decisions regarding the
nature and structure of the proposed DL, the design and organization issues, access
management, technical issues involving hardware, software, and so on. A distributed
approach would certainly be useful whereby the participating universities may have their own
DL collections that can be accessed by others locally as well as remotely. Adoption of a
common simple database design structure would facilitate a seamless access to the digital
libraries, held at various universities and institutions, through a common user interface.
Design of the DL and selection of software are critical issues, and to begin with I would
recommend a simple bibliographic database approach, something similar to the NDLTD but
with modifications as necessary, giving search and access facilities to the bibliographic
details and abstracts of the theses and dissertations. A simple text retrieval software that is
capable of working in the Web environment may be useful. However, a software that can, in
future, support full text search capabilities may be an ideal choice. Again, this is a matter of
discussions, trials, pilot run, etc.

Developments proposed in stage one above would allow users to search a particular local
institution or a collection of regional and/or national institutions, for theses and dissertations
and would retrieve a list of selected theses and dissertations with bibliographic details and
abstracts. This has to be backed up by an efficient document delivery service. Fortunately
INFLIBNET has already have such a service in place that can be used for making the hard
copies of theses and dissertations available to the users. The search and retrieval features to
be provided will depend upon the software chosen.

Stage two
Once the first phase of the project is put in place and is working, the next obvious stage will
be to find ways of making the theses and dissertations available online so that users do not
need to go through the expensive and time-consuming document delivery services. The
simplest approach would be to make the documents available online in PDF format. PDF
files are smaller in size, can contain both text and images, and cannot be altered by users.
They may sit on a web server maintained by each participating institution or at a central
location that can be retrieved and downloaded by users at the end of their search sessions.

Converting paper documents to a PDF format may be quite a resource-intensive activity, and
this cannot possibly be done for all the theses and dissertations produced in the past. A policy
framework may be drawn for this purpose to make the selection, if the conversion has to be
made. However, all the Universities and institutions may be advised to instruct the researchers
to submit a soft copy of their theses that can be stored electronically in PDF format. This may
not be a burden for the researchers since most of the theses are now wordprocessed, and all
they need is to submit a soft copy of the thesis/dissertation along with the required hard
copies. However, in the long run submission of hard copies may be completely unnecessary
once everything related to the thesis submission to examination becomes online, as is the case
with Virginia Tech, USA (note that the primary objective of their ETD project was to do
away with the paper copies of theses and dissertations).

Once the full texts of theses and dissertations are made available online, copyright regulations
and access management systems are to be considered to retain and support the intellectual
property rights. However, while intellectual forgery may be easy to make (!) in an electronic
digital library, at the same time the watchdogs (supervisors, examiners, and the authors
themselves) will be better equipped to check for it using the same electronic network.

3
Stage three
Once the PDF files of theses and dissertations are available on the system, it may be useful to
provide full text search capabilities. However, this is a major policy decision, because one
has to make a choice between the utility/speed and sophistication of the system. Many digital
libraries of today provide full text search capabilities, while a good umber still limit the
searches on selected bibliographic fields and abstracts.

Side by side the electronic theses and dissertations, users may need online access to some
special collections that may vary from institution to institution and subject to subject. Local
digital libraries of special materials may be built and made available to all, or elected users, of
the system.

Conclusion
Simple guidelines to building a digital library of theses and dissertations produced in Indian
Universities and institutions of higher learning have been proposed in this paper. The
guidelines are general and need to be discussed and tested at each stage. Some critical
decisions are to be made at some point and these are to be supported by appropriate
workshops/ group discussions, systems analysis, pilot testing, etc. Nevertheless, the process
of building a digital library of theses and dissertations is rather simple and it can be
accomplished without recourse to much resources. The return will however, be immense;
research information will be available to the users fast, all round the clock, and this will help
them avoid duplication of research efforts and thus wastage of intellectual as well as other
resources. Constant access to research information will also stimulate better thinking resulting
in new and novel ideas that may eventually benefit the society at large.

References
1. E.A. Fox, The Digital Libraries Initiative: Update and Discussion, Bulletin of the
American Society for Information Science. October/November (1999) 7-11.
2. Digital Libraries Initiatives. Available at: http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/ (26
September 2000).
3. eLib: Electronic Libraries Programme. Available at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ (visited 25 September).
4. N. Meyyappan, G.G. Chowdhury and Schubert Foo. A review of twenty digital
libraries. Journal of Information Science. 26 (5), 2000. 331-348
5. G.G. Chowdhury and Sudatta Chowdhury. An overview of the information retrieval
features of twenty digital libraries. Program, 34(4), October 2000, 341-373.

6. G.G. Chowdhury and Sudatta Chowdhury. Digital library research: issues and trends.
Journal of Documentation, 55 (4), 1999, 409—448.

7. C. Rusbridge. Towards the hybrid library. D-Lib magazine, 4(7), July/August 1998.
Online. Available: http://wwwdlib.org/dlib/july98/rusbridge/07rusbridge.html

8. C. Oppenheim and D. Smithson. What is a hybrid library? Journal of Information

Science, 25(2), 1999, 97—112.