Digital Libraries for Colleges

Digital Libraries for Colleges

June 24, 2003

Srinivasan Ramani, HP labs, India, [email protected]

Shalini Urs, Vidyanidhi Project, Mysore University, [email protected]

T. A. V. Murthy, Director, INFLIBNET,[email protected]

page 2March 28, 2003 Internet Access for Colleges

Size of the Indian Educational SystemSource: Report of the National Statistical Commission, Volume II, Aug. 2001

India has 237 degree granting institutions at the university level,

Over 10,000 colleges, affiliated to the above, teaching students in the 18-25 age group

28,000 higher secondary schools offering 11-12 grade education,

80,000 high schools, plus 190,000 middle schools, and

627,000 primary schools.


Minimal needs of a college as perceived in India at present

LAN

Dial-up Router

Proxy Server

PSTN ISP


Access to Internet for Colleges

• Services currently planned • Email• Limited web access

• Capacity and cost of PSTN dial-up• 100 Megabytes per day inflow, including email (56 Kbps x 3600 seconds x 4 hours) • Cost = approximately Rs 1.5/MB per college; Rs 150 (US$3) per college per day.• Cost = $11 million per year, for 10,000 colleges.


The Basic Proposal (to enhance currently planned dial-up)

• A single dial-up link is too slow to supply Internet web pages to multiple users on the Local Area Network of a college.

• We can, and should, supplement dial-up links using receive-only satellite communication equipment, to provide a reliable, inexpensive and day long communication channel for meeting this need.

• In addition, we can use relatively unvarying web pages, such as an encyclopedia, e-books, or dictionaries, using DVDs, updated by post once in a month or two.


Local store

Proxy Server

Collection of

relatively stable

web pages on DVD

Using Data Broadcast by Satellite to transfer web pages and other

data

Local Area Network

Dial-up Equipment

Telephone Network

Receive onlySatellite Data

Receiver


Local Archive with about 15 GB Content

500 MB per day by satellite receive only

Up to 56 Kbps for email and Internet

Web browsing

Email and local searches

3.5 GB on hard disc updated every week

10 GB on four online DVDs, replaced monthly


Content related questions

•What would be implications, for the creation of content and its storage in a distributed form?

•What are the implications for sustainability of content creation?

•When a network is visualized with a large number of low bandwidth interactive links, should we not focus on broadcast of metadata and local search?


Contents

• The system provides for controlling access to broadcast content on subscription basis

• It can also collect and collate statistics on usage, to plan its transmissions

• Therefore, we can make available to users– Publicly available archives and web pages and

multimediamaterial that the system is permitted to transmit either free to all colleges, or accessible to only to colleges subscribing to them individually

– Collections of meta-data to facilitate local searching • We can also equip colleges with software to

facilitate local searching using simple search engines as well as superior bibliographic search applications.


The Huge Affordability Gap

• Local research is essential, but not isolated – it has to be internationally connected. This requires access to world knowledge at affordable cost.

• What is the cost per seat of commercially available international content? At 12$ a year per university student, India would need to spend $100 million/year on licensing online content.

• This problem is not unique to our billion people, we share it with another four billion people in the world!

• The big gap in affordability is matched by a matching gap in the cost of creating content – content can be created locally at one tenth the international cost, with the added value of giving a voice to the local researcher.

• The challenge is in creating quality content – we need inexpensive content, but not cheap content!


Creating Local Content

•Local research would be very difficult unless it has access to a publication mechanism

•Special problems arise when the area of research is not primarily of international relevance – like local politics and economics, literature in local languages, locally available natural products

•A specific requirement is publication in ones own languages


Ensuring that we do not get isolated

• While local content creation and publication is essential, we need access to international content as well.

• The information dissemination system being described provides an excellent method of controlling and monitoring usage. Hence, it supports national initiatives for licensing international content for use in various modes.

• Being connected involves commitments to standards at various levels, and the standards most relevant to us are what university communities of the world evolve for themselves.


Using the Hybrid System

• Frequently used web pages can be broadcast, to be stored locally at the colleges. Updates can be sent whenever a change occurs, or by default once a week or so, to build up content in new receivers set up that week.

• Email would be handled only on the dial-up link operating in parallel with the satellite link.

• Web pages which are not included in the broadcast can also be fetched over dial-up.

• Automatic centralized data collection would give us statistics on relative popularity of approved websites, to program broadcasting efficiently.


Adding Voice Broadcastingand Slide Presentations

• 1, 2 or 3 voice channels can be provided for sharing nationwide talks, seminars, conferences etc. Please note that this does not provide for video.

• PowerPoint presentations can be sent over the broadcast channel, and can be accompanied by relevant speech clips. These would be stored locally, and can be played whenever required by any student, over the LAN. Slides can be automatically synchronized with the associated voice stream, in case of real time speeches, as well as in case of stored speeches.


Easy Up linking

• A professor in any university can be a speaker on a broadcast channel. All he would need to do is to make an ISDN phone call to the transmitting location and speak over the phone. This costs the same as STD.

• Students can ask questions in real time by telephoning the speaker, using common phones.

• Demonstration of all these facilities is available now.

Documents

Digital Libraries for Colleges