Global Meet to Discuss Digitising Libraries

New Delhi, Feb 15 (IANS) Experts from the field of information communication technology and education will gather here for a four-day conference starting Feb 23 to discuss how to digitise the world’s print based libraries. The International Conference on Digital Libraries will be held at the India Habitat Centre and is being organised by the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in collaboration with TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute). The event will be inaugurated Feb 23 by union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal. Experts from 30 countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, New Zealand and Spain, will deliberate on how digitization modules can be used for converting the corpus of existing print and manuscript resources into digitized format and how libraries can be interlinked through the world wide web. Explaining the agenda of the event, IGNOU Pro Vice-Chancellor K.R. Srivathsan said: “Today’s students do not want to go to libraries, but would love to pursue knowledge through the web. So it is necessary to customise the libraries online, network all libraries of the world for all domains of knowledge for sharing, research and development.” He added that with the boom in technology, information can easily be accessed via multimedia, e-content, e-Books, i-pads. The conference will also address how to address copyright issues tagged with the corpus in the print and manuscript resources, and evolve regulatory policies required to handle the intellectual property rights issues. Minister for State D. Purandeswari from the HRD ministry, IGNOU Vice-Chancellor V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai, TERI director general R.K. Pachauri and N. Balakrishnan from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, will be participating in the conference. [LM1]