Books digitisation project under way

CHENNAI DEC. 26. Tamil Nadu is one the four States where the Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, in association with the Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S., is implementing a project to digitise one million books.

Work on a $30-million project, funded equally by the U.S., China and India, was apace and nearly 20,000 books had been digitised in about six months, Raj Reddy, University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at the School of Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University, said.

A significant number of books in local languages would be digitised under the project, which would be completed in 2006.

Speaking to mediapersons after addressing the annual day of SSN School of Advanced Software Engineering on the Old Mahabalipuram Road here today, Dr. Reddy said the project was also carried out in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Authors had agreed for hosting their works on the Internet.

The Allahabad University library figured in the project, Dr. Reddy said, adding the Anna University, Kancheepuram, Thanjavur and Madurai were selected as centres for scanning books. While 40 centres in the four States were scanning about 10,000 pages a day, the objective was to increase it to 100 centres to scan a million pages a day. The project, likely to be christened `Digital Library of India', was being implemented on similar lines in China.

Stating that the SSNSASE could play an active role in the project, Dr. Reddy, delivering the annual day lecture on `Increasing the relevance of IT for India', said information and communications technology could be a powerful tool to facilitate affordable solutions in economic and societal development and in protection of environment.

The SSNSASE founder and HCL Technologies chairman, Shiv Nadar, said the first batch of students completed their courses based on a CMU software engineering curriculum. The students would proceed in January to CMU for a Masters in software engineering.