Vidyanidhi - the evolving Indian Digital Library of Electronic Theses Initiative

Vidyanidhi - the evolving Indian Digital Library of Electronic Theses Initiative

Shalini Urs

This paper outlines the context, premises, goals, objectives, strategies and the architecture of the Vidyanidhi Project. Vidyanidhi is a project conceived with the objective of demonstrating the feasibility of Electronic Theses and Dissertations in the Indian context. The pilot phase of the study has been successfully completed. In the second phase, Vidyanidhi is evolving into a national effort to improve the research capacities of Indian Universities by developing appropriate enabling frameworks for the creation, archiving, and accessing of Indian doctoral research. The goals of Vidyanidhi are two - to evolve into an information infrastructure and enabling framework for enhancing the quality of doctoral research and to develop a mechanism for depositing and accessing Indian electronic theses/digital theses from anywhere, anytime Vidyanidhi strategies are centred on - evolving appropriate policy framework through meetings, participation, liaison and other methods; offering education and training; building content; developing resources and tools - for online depositing of theses, interfaces, online thesauri and others Currently Vidyanidhi is working towards a collaborative and cooperative organisational model for the depositing and archiving of ETDs by the participating universities.

2003