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An Evaluation of Digital Libraries and Institutional Repositories in India
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES · An Evaluation of Digital Libraries and Institutional Repositories in India by Manorama Tripathi and V.K.J. Jeevan Available online 13 September 2011
INTRODUCTION Digitization is becoming more common in library and information centers throughout India. India's former president Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, has even entered into the discussion by remarking that a “digital library is where past meets the present and creates a future.”1 With this current growth and interest in digital libraries and institutional repositories, it is useful to look at what is currently being offered and what is in development. Universities and other organizations are spending large amounts of money on setting up digital libraries and institutional repositories. Therefore it is important to find out how these are being used — and what kind of access they provide. An evaluation of these projects will help to understand how these initiatives stand out in the global digital space, and may also illustrate where individual digital libraries and repositories can improve and what steps should be taken to streamline them further in terms of collection, access and visibility. This paper aims to provide an overview of digital libraries and institutional repositories in India and to evaluate their features using criteria established in other studies already conducted in India and internationally. This may help to assess how each of the digital facilities rate on an international scale.
METHODOLOGY This study evaluates and reviews four digital libraries and twenty institutional repositories from a mix of India's top universities, technology institutes and research institutes, which were selected using the Registry of Open Access Repositories.2 A full list of the digital libraries and institutional repositories used can be found in Appendix A of Supplementary materials. Some of the digital libraries which were originally selected could not be included because their websites were not functioning.
Development of Evaluation Criteria Used Fernandez studied online repositories throughout India to trace their growth and development by collecting data through interviews.3 Bhat evaluated nine open access repositories in the field of computer
Manorama Tripathi, Deputy Librarian, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi-110067, India; V.K.J. Jeevan, Deputy Librarian, Indira Gandhi National Open University, Maidan Garhi, New Delhi-110068, India .
science and information technology.4 The repositories were examined using the following criteria; content, preservation policies, rights management, promotion, services, and feedback and access. Meyyappan, Chowdhury and Foo studied twenty digital libraries worldwide using the criteria of content, type of library, organization of information, user interface, access, information retrieval, search features, output format, and links to other Internet resources.5 Jeng studied different academic digital libraries and found that ease of use, satisfaction, efficiency, and effectiveness are the most important criteria to use when evaluating digital libraries.6 The criteria used in this study were developed based on the findings above.
THE EVALUATION
AND ITS
FINDINGS
Collection Most of the institutions studied digitally archive post-prints and preprints of research publications, annual reports, theses, and institutional publications in their institutional repository. Out of the 20 institutional repositories included, the archive at the Indian Institute of Science holds the largest collection with over 15,000 documents followed by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources' online periodicals repository, and the repository of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics which hold 5000 articles each. The institutional repositories of the Raman Research Institute and the National Institute of Oceanography hold around 3000 articles each. The repositories of the Indian Institute of Technology and the National Centre for Catalysis Research each hold around 1500 documents and those at the National Institute of Technology and Mahatma Gandhi University have almost 1000 items each. The repositories of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations of Indian Institute of Science, the National Centre for Antarctica and Ocean Research, ethesis at the National Institute of Technology Rourkela and DSpace at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIMK) each have around 500 documents. Between 300 and 400 items are archived in the repositories at both the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, and the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation. The institutional repositories of the National Metallurgical Laboratory and the Central Drug Research Institute each have about 200 documents while repositories at the Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology and the School of Biotechnology at Madurai Kamaraj University each hold less than 100 items. (See Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 1 for more information on size of collection, type of documents and subjects covered.) A similar assessment of digital libraries is difficult to make as the holdings are more complex. The Muktabodha Digital Library has 210,000 pages of digital images and 2000 texts of rare manuscripts. The Kalasampada Digital Library has 1000 h of audio and video recordings, 25,000 digitized copies of rare books and around 100,000 visual items.
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 37, Number 6, pages 543–545
November 2011 543
The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has 218 scanned books and over 200,000 transcriptions; and finally the Archives of Indian Labour has 400 h of taped interviews and 100,000 printed pages. In summary, ten of the above libraries hold fewer than one thousand items and two have less than 100. However, four of the libraries have more than 100,000 items. When compared to digital libraries overseas such as, the American Memory of US Library of Congress which has 9 million items,7 and the Internet Archive which has 4,500,303 items,8 Indian digital libraries have a long way to go in building up their collections.
Content Four of the libraries/repositories examined are exclusively for theses and dissertations and seventeen of them also hold preprints, post-prints, working papers, conference papers, annual reports and technical reports. Most of the digital libraries and institutional repositories tend to cover the subjects researched or taught at the parent organization however, a small number of them cover a broader subject base.
Access Facility All of the digital libraries and institutional repositories included in this study have mechanisms in place to control access to their collections. Three different levels of access were observed: access is granted only to the staff, students, and researchers of the parent organization which hosts the repository; access is granted to the public to only part of the collection; and access is granted to the public to the entire collection. Some of the digital libraries/institutional repositories restrict access to journal articles due to publishers' permissions policies however, in such cases a ‘request a copy form’ is available. All of the repositories permit free access to abstracts without any registration necessary. However, most of the repositories require the user to register for accessing the full text item. Some digital libraries limit full text access to an intranet due to agreements with publishers or owners of content. (See Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 2 for more information on access.)
Organization of Information The organization of information plays an important role in any digital library or institutional repository, however the libraries are somewhat bound by the software that they implement. Most of the projects included in this study use DSpace or Eprints (see Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 3). The features offered by the chosen software can be extended by the individual installers. This means that even in cases where the same software was used, varying configurations and customization was carried out so that the options and features offered by the repositories were different. Most of the libraries examined organized information by community, collection, issue date, author, title, subject, year, keyword, scholar, guide, division, thesis supervisor, document type, and e-print type. Recent additions to the repository were usually highlighted. (See Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 2 for information on how each repository organizes its information.)
Copyright Information There is a need to follow copyright laws while selecting materials for digitization and establishing access policies for digital libraries and institutional repositories. The copyright statements on digital content in libraries need to be clear. The libraries have a responsibility to provide copyright information to the users and to educate them about the fair use of digital collections. Most of the digital libraries included in this study did not provide adequate copyright information, however the institutional repositories did link to the SHERPA/ROMEO website which highlights standard university copyright policies.
544 The Journal of Academic Librarianship
Usage Statistics and Feedback Mechanisms “We cannot call a digital-library or electronic-publishing system a success if we cannot measure and interpret its use.”9 Twenty-one of the twenty-four digital libraries and institutional repositories examined, do not provide usage statistics. The three that do include detailed usage statistics by month that show how many documents were uploaded, viewed and downloaded. User satisfaction is essential for the success of a digital library. To reflect this, libraries should invite comments and feedback from their users. Most of the repositories surveyed do not have any provision for users to provide feedback, however the four digital libraries did provide contact information. Xie states that just providing contact information is not enough; it should be designed in a standard and consistent manner and should be easily accessible to the users. It should open a channel of communication between the potential users and developers so that the use of the digital facility may be enhanced by continuously improving the functionalities as per the users' needs.10
Accessibility Accessibility of a website implies that the content should be accessible to a wide range of people, including those with disabilities such as, blindness or low vision, deafness or hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these.11 None of the 24 digital libraries and institutional repositories studied included any features to accommodate disabilities.
Search Interface The search interface determines the popularity and use of a digital library or institutional repository. This study adopted the criteria used by Smith to evaluate the search features of various digital libraries. These are: Boolean logic, phrase/proximity searching, relevancy ranking, browsing indexes, truncation, field searching, extent of searching, case sensitive searching, controlled vocabulary, language translation, date/ range searching, refining of initial search, related items, multimedia searching, advanced/basic search facilities, display features, and help/ documentation information.12 Most of the digital libraries and institutional repositories examined in this study use DSpace or Eprints and are therefore dependent on the predetermined search features included in these software packages.
CONCLUSION Some of the digital libraries and institutional repositories included in this study originated from a desire on the part of the library professionals or computer staff to increase the visibility of their services and work. It is difficult for such experimental initiatives to gain the required thrust to succeed unless there is an institutional policy and support in terms of funds and infrastructure. Institutions should be aware of the opportunities of open access and the need to create institutional repositories of in-house content to enhance the visibility of the institution's intellectual property. We have not attempted to be judgmental in regards to the facilities and services provided by these digital libraries and institutional repositories. Instead we have summarized and highlighted their different features and options. Most of the libraries studied are making a good effort, subject to the constraints in which they operate and some are constantly trying to further improve the facility. This is a positive sign of the importance of these initiatives to the people and institutions that developed them. The digital libraries and institutional repositories need to concentrate on improving their search features. This would lead to retrieval efficiency and more usability. They should also concentrate on improving their content coverage which is not so satisfactory with many of the digital repositories.
Ideally all these digital libraries and institutional repositories should have been positively reviewed in each of the evaluation criteria. Identifying a negative review in a category is the first step to understanding that there is scope for further improvement on that count. Following particular criteria recommendations would help to retrieve more relevant results, improve the content coverage, and enhance the usability of the facility. Thus the results of the study may be relevant to the developer of the facility to illustrate what needs to be done for the overall improvement of a locally developed digital information facility. The digital libraries and institutional repositories included in this study need to strengthen and enlarge their collections as only a small number of them have more than one thousand items. Even the repositories of those institutions which publish large numbers of papers in scholarly journals do not reflect this in their repositories. Organizations should ensure their faculty members submit their articles and research papers to the institution's repositories by making deposit mandatory. The digital libraries and institutional repositories should be made more ‘accessible’ in order to ensure their reach extends to people with disabilities. Finally, the digital libraries and repositories need to train users in copyright and other intellectual property rights issues so that these facilities are compliant with such rights.
APPENDIX A. SUPPLEMENTARY DATA Supplementary data to this article can be found online at doi:10.1016/ j.acalib.2011.08.012.
REFERENCES 1. Information for Development, Digital Library in India, available at: http://www.i4donline.net/articles/current-article.asp?articleid= 1759&typ=Features (accessed 13, August, 2011).
2. Registry of Open Access Repositories, available at: http://roar. eprints.org/ (accessed 24 July, 2011). 3. Fernandez, L. (2006), “Open access initiatives in India — an evaluation”, Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Vol. 1 No. 1, available at: http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/ index.php/perj/article/view/110/172 (accessed 19 November, 2010). 4. Bhat, M.H. (2009), “Open access repositories in computer science and information technology”, IFLA Journal, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 243–257. 5. Meyyappan, N., Chowdhury, and Foo, S. (2000), “A review of the status of 20 digital libraries”. Journal of Information Science, Vol. 26 No. 5, pp. 337–355. 6. Jeng, J. (2005), “What is usability in the context of the digital library and how can it be measured?” Information Technology and Libraries, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 47–56. 7. Library of Congress American Memory (2011), available at: http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/faq.html (accessed 31, July, 2011). 8. Internet Archive (2011), available at: http://www.archive.org/ (accessed 31 July, 2011). 9. Bishop, A.P. (1998), “Logins and bailouts: measuring access, use and success in digital libraries”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4 No. 2, available at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/ textidx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0004.207 (accessed 27 January, 2011). 10. Xie, H.I. (2008), “Users' evaluation of digital libraries (DLs): their uses, their criteria, and their assessment”, Information Processing and Management: An International Journal, Vol. 44 No. 3, pp. 1346–1373. 11. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, (2008) available at: http:// www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ (accessed 24 July, 2011). 12. Smith, A.G. (2000), “Search features of digital libraries”, Information Research, Vol. 5 No. 3, available at: http://informationr.net/ir/5-3/ paper73.html (accessed 19 November, 2010).
November 2011 545
INTRODUCTION Digitization is becoming more common in library and information centers throughout India. India's former president Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, has even entered into the discussion by remarking that a “digital library is where past meets the present and creates a future.”1 With this current growth and interest in digital libraries and institutional repositories, it is useful to look at what is currently being offered and what is in development. Universities and other organizations are spending large amounts of money on setting up digital libraries and institutional repositories. Therefore it is important to find out how these are being used — and what kind of access they provide. An evaluation of these projects will help to understand how these initiatives stand out in the global digital space, and may also illustrate where individual digital libraries and repositories can improve and what steps should be taken to streamline them further in terms of collection, access and visibility. This paper aims to provide an overview of digital libraries and institutional repositories in India and to evaluate their features using criteria established in other studies already conducted in India and internationally. This may help to assess how each of the digital facilities rate on an international scale.
METHODOLOGY This study evaluates and reviews four digital libraries and twenty institutional repositories from a mix of India's top universities, technology institutes and research institutes, which were selected using the Registry of Open Access Repositories.2 A full list of the digital libraries and institutional repositories used can be found in Appendix A of Supplementary materials. Some of the digital libraries which were originally selected could not be included because their websites were not functioning.
Development of Evaluation Criteria Used Fernandez studied online repositories throughout India to trace their growth and development by collecting data through interviews.3 Bhat evaluated nine open access repositories in the field of computer
Manorama Tripathi, Deputy Librarian, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi-110067, India
science and information technology.4 The repositories were examined using the following criteria; content, preservation policies, rights management, promotion, services, and feedback and access. Meyyappan, Chowdhury and Foo studied twenty digital libraries worldwide using the criteria of content, type of library, organization of information, user interface, access, information retrieval, search features, output format, and links to other Internet resources.5 Jeng studied different academic digital libraries and found that ease of use, satisfaction, efficiency, and effectiveness are the most important criteria to use when evaluating digital libraries.6 The criteria used in this study were developed based on the findings above.
THE EVALUATION
AND ITS
FINDINGS
Collection Most of the institutions studied digitally archive post-prints and preprints of research publications, annual reports, theses, and institutional publications in their institutional repository. Out of the 20 institutional repositories included, the archive at the Indian Institute of Science holds the largest collection with over 15,000 documents followed by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources' online periodicals repository, and the repository of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics which hold 5000 articles each. The institutional repositories of the Raman Research Institute and the National Institute of Oceanography hold around 3000 articles each. The repositories of the Indian Institute of Technology and the National Centre for Catalysis Research each hold around 1500 documents and those at the National Institute of Technology and Mahatma Gandhi University have almost 1000 items each. The repositories of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations of Indian Institute of Science, the National Centre for Antarctica and Ocean Research, ethesis at the National Institute of Technology Rourkela and DSpace at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIMK) each have around 500 documents. Between 300 and 400 items are archived in the repositories at both the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, and the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation. The institutional repositories of the National Metallurgical Laboratory and the Central Drug Research Institute each have about 200 documents while repositories at the Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology and the School of Biotechnology at Madurai Kamaraj University each hold less than 100 items. (See Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 1 for more information on size of collection, type of documents and subjects covered.) A similar assessment of digital libraries is difficult to make as the holdings are more complex. The Muktabodha Digital Library has 210,000 pages of digital images and 2000 texts of rare manuscripts. The Kalasampada Digital Library has 1000 h of audio and video recordings, 25,000 digitized copies of rare books and around 100,000 visual items.
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 37, Number 6, pages 543–545
November 2011 543
The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has 218 scanned books and over 200,000 transcriptions; and finally the Archives of Indian Labour has 400 h of taped interviews and 100,000 printed pages. In summary, ten of the above libraries hold fewer than one thousand items and two have less than 100. However, four of the libraries have more than 100,000 items. When compared to digital libraries overseas such as, the American Memory of US Library of Congress which has 9 million items,7 and the Internet Archive which has 4,500,303 items,8 Indian digital libraries have a long way to go in building up their collections.
Content Four of the libraries/repositories examined are exclusively for theses and dissertations and seventeen of them also hold preprints, post-prints, working papers, conference papers, annual reports and technical reports. Most of the digital libraries and institutional repositories tend to cover the subjects researched or taught at the parent organization however, a small number of them cover a broader subject base.
Access Facility All of the digital libraries and institutional repositories included in this study have mechanisms in place to control access to their collections. Three different levels of access were observed: access is granted only to the staff, students, and researchers of the parent organization which hosts the repository; access is granted to the public to only part of the collection; and access is granted to the public to the entire collection. Some of the digital libraries/institutional repositories restrict access to journal articles due to publishers' permissions policies however, in such cases a ‘request a copy form’ is available. All of the repositories permit free access to abstracts without any registration necessary. However, most of the repositories require the user to register for accessing the full text item. Some digital libraries limit full text access to an intranet due to agreements with publishers or owners of content. (See Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 2 for more information on access.)
Organization of Information The organization of information plays an important role in any digital library or institutional repository, however the libraries are somewhat bound by the software that they implement. Most of the projects included in this study use DSpace or Eprints (see Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 3). The features offered by the chosen software can be extended by the individual installers. This means that even in cases where the same software was used, varying configurations and customization was carried out so that the options and features offered by the repositories were different. Most of the libraries examined organized information by community, collection, issue date, author, title, subject, year, keyword, scholar, guide, division, thesis supervisor, document type, and e-print type. Recent additions to the repository were usually highlighted. (See Appendix B of Supplementary materials, Table 2 for information on how each repository organizes its information.)
Copyright Information There is a need to follow copyright laws while selecting materials for digitization and establishing access policies for digital libraries and institutional repositories. The copyright statements on digital content in libraries need to be clear. The libraries have a responsibility to provide copyright information to the users and to educate them about the fair use of digital collections. Most of the digital libraries included in this study did not provide adequate copyright information, however the institutional repositories did link to the SHERPA/ROMEO website which highlights standard university copyright policies.
544 The Journal of Academic Librarianship
Usage Statistics and Feedback Mechanisms “We cannot call a digital-library or electronic-publishing system a success if we cannot measure and interpret its use.”9 Twenty-one of the twenty-four digital libraries and institutional repositories examined, do not provide usage statistics. The three that do include detailed usage statistics by month that show how many documents were uploaded, viewed and downloaded. User satisfaction is essential for the success of a digital library. To reflect this, libraries should invite comments and feedback from their users. Most of the repositories surveyed do not have any provision for users to provide feedback, however the four digital libraries did provide contact information. Xie states that just providing contact information is not enough; it should be designed in a standard and consistent manner and should be easily accessible to the users. It should open a channel of communication between the potential users and developers so that the use of the digital facility may be enhanced by continuously improving the functionalities as per the users' needs.10
Accessibility Accessibility of a website implies that the content should be accessible to a wide range of people, including those with disabilities such as, blindness or low vision, deafness or hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these.11 None of the 24 digital libraries and institutional repositories studied included any features to accommodate disabilities.
Search Interface The search interface determines the popularity and use of a digital library or institutional repository. This study adopted the criteria used by Smith to evaluate the search features of various digital libraries. These are: Boolean logic, phrase/proximity searching, relevancy ranking, browsing indexes, truncation, field searching, extent of searching, case sensitive searching, controlled vocabulary, language translation, date/ range searching, refining of initial search, related items, multimedia searching, advanced/basic search facilities, display features, and help/ documentation information.12 Most of the digital libraries and institutional repositories examined in this study use DSpace or Eprints and are therefore dependent on the predetermined search features included in these software packages.
CONCLUSION Some of the digital libraries and institutional repositories included in this study originated from a desire on the part of the library professionals or computer staff to increase the visibility of their services and work. It is difficult for such experimental initiatives to gain the required thrust to succeed unless there is an institutional policy and support in terms of funds and infrastructure. Institutions should be aware of the opportunities of open access and the need to create institutional repositories of in-house content to enhance the visibility of the institution's intellectual property. We have not attempted to be judgmental in regards to the facilities and services provided by these digital libraries and institutional repositories. Instead we have summarized and highlighted their different features and options. Most of the libraries studied are making a good effort, subject to the constraints in which they operate and some are constantly trying to further improve the facility. This is a positive sign of the importance of these initiatives to the people and institutions that developed them. The digital libraries and institutional repositories need to concentrate on improving their search features. This would lead to retrieval efficiency and more usability. They should also concentrate on improving their content coverage which is not so satisfactory with many of the digital repositories.
Ideally all these digital libraries and institutional repositories should have been positively reviewed in each of the evaluation criteria. Identifying a negative review in a category is the first step to understanding that there is scope for further improvement on that count. Following particular criteria recommendations would help to retrieve more relevant results, improve the content coverage, and enhance the usability of the facility. Thus the results of the study may be relevant to the developer of the facility to illustrate what needs to be done for the overall improvement of a locally developed digital information facility. The digital libraries and institutional repositories included in this study need to strengthen and enlarge their collections as only a small number of them have more than one thousand items. Even the repositories of those institutions which publish large numbers of papers in scholarly journals do not reflect this in their repositories. Organizations should ensure their faculty members submit their articles and research papers to the institution's repositories by making deposit mandatory. The digital libraries and institutional repositories should be made more ‘accessible’ in order to ensure their reach extends to people with disabilities. Finally, the digital libraries and repositories need to train users in copyright and other intellectual property rights issues so that these facilities are compliant with such rights.
APPENDIX A. SUPPLEMENTARY DATA Supplementary data to this article can be found online at doi:10.1016/ j.acalib.2011.08.012.
REFERENCES 1. Information for Development, Digital Library in India, available at: http://www.i4donline.net/articles/current-article.asp?articleid= 1759&typ=Features (accessed 13, August, 2011).
2. Registry of Open Access Repositories, available at: http://roar. eprints.org/ (accessed 24 July, 2011). 3. Fernandez, L. (2006), “Open access initiatives in India — an evaluation”, Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Vol. 1 No. 1, available at: http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/ index.php/perj/article/view/110/172 (accessed 19 November, 2010). 4. Bhat, M.H. (2009), “Open access repositories in computer science and information technology”, IFLA Journal, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 243–257. 5. Meyyappan, N., Chowdhury, and Foo, S. (2000), “A review of the status of 20 digital libraries”. Journal of Information Science, Vol. 26 No. 5, pp. 337–355. 6. Jeng, J. (2005), “What is usability in the context of the digital library and how can it be measured?” Information Technology and Libraries, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 47–56. 7. Library of Congress American Memory (2011), available at: http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/faq.html (accessed 31, July, 2011). 8. Internet Archive (2011), available at: http://www.archive.org/ (accessed 31 July, 2011). 9. Bishop, A.P. (1998), “Logins and bailouts: measuring access, use and success in digital libraries”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4 No. 2, available at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/ textidx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0004.207 (accessed 27 January, 2011). 10. Xie, H.I. (2008), “Users' evaluation of digital libraries (DLs): their uses, their criteria, and their assessment”, Information Processing and Management: An International Journal, Vol. 44 No. 3, pp. 1346–1373. 11. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, (2008) available at: http:// www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ (accessed 24 July, 2011). 12. Smith, A.G. (2000), “Search features of digital libraries”, Information Research, Vol. 5 No. 3, available at: http://informationr.net/ir/5-3/ paper73.html (accessed 19 November, 2010).
November 2011 545