The Ministry of Human Resource Development under National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) initiated the National Digital Library (NDL) Pilot Project (NDL Phase-I) in April, 2015 with project cost of Rs. 39.8 Crores.
The National Digital Library Project is coordinated by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
NDL Phase-I covers setting up 24X7 infrastructure, providing single-window search and browse facility for e-Learning resources to users, including e-Contents that are available in various institutions of the country by integrating Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) of respective institutions and registering users from Participating Institutions.
The alpha version of the NDL Phase-I Portal has been made operational on February, 2016, which is available at https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in. Since it is a Digital Library, it is seamlessly available without any State/UT wise physical or accessibility constraint.
National Digital Library is accessible to all students, teachers, researchers, Government Officials, Public Servants, etc. irrespective of their State/UT. Targets for NDL Phase-I are as follows:-
(i) No. of contents: 5 Lakhs
(ii) No. of Institutional Digital Repository for integration: 100
(iii) No. of Participating Institutions from which users are to be registered: 200
National Digital Library currently hosts contents in 70 languages, both in Indian and Foreign. The user interface through which users can search/ browse contents is mostly English and also available in Hindi and Bengali at present.
The implementation timeframe for NDL Phase-I is 3 year, from April, 2015 to March, 2018.