Bengali Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebration Kolkata/Submissions/Bridging the Digital Divide: Enabling Indic Support in Public Library Websites

Submission no.

Title of the submission

Bridging the Digital Divide: Enabling Indic Support in Public Library Websites

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Author of the submission

Sandip

E-mail address

Username

Country of origin

India

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

In the present era of Web, Open Source Software & Solutions are flowing with the river-current to attain tremendous popularity. A set of software tools freely available along with the source code, so that anyone will be able to use, modify & redistribute, can be considered under the umbrella of Open Source Software. The Open Source movement is serving as the spearhead, for all academicians and professionals, against the pessimistic dominance of the publishing community. Also it enhances creativity and development as it is open to anyone willing to contribute and supports personalized deployment. The community which has been largely buffeted by this changing wind is the Library & Information Science society. Open Source Software have aided the Library and Information Centers to develop a user base & user services through the use of web interface. To manage library services and to build a digital library under sustainable economic and financial conditions, open source software and solutions are probably the best, promising good quality and efficiency. Tons of open source software packages are available on web, which are being deployed largely for making a library high-tech. This article is motivated by the challenges & opportunities faced by the software localizers’ community when they try to enable support for Unicode-based Indic Scripts. In the domain of Library and Information Science, Public Libraries have a history of giving Information service with Indic support (more specifically dissemination of information in local language). Actually the popularity of Public Libraries depends on Indic support & Selective dissemination of information as its users belong to heterogeneous class (poor literacy rate, multilingual society with little or no comprehension of English (which is the de-facto language of IT).). In the present era of digitalization, the public libraries won’t survive if services like Indic support are not adapted. The aim is to provide access to all. It is to be kept in mind that indexing capability, font support, as well as varying levels of maturity of software components that build up the technology stack on which Indic Support enabled Library Information Systems have been built, are equally developed. In this paper, the mode of Indic support provided by Library management software (Koha), Digital Library software (Dspace), Content Management Software (Drupal) has been discussed. Also, how a Public Library can adopt these services for providing better services to its users has been discussed. Case-study of Bengali script support by Koha and Dspace has been provided. We have built our own web interface for providing online information and reference services using Drupal, and we are providing support in Bengali language. The aim is to send the message to all public libraries that they can adopt these softwares readily with ample scope for personalization for providing better community information service in today’s electronic environment.

Track

Language of Track

English

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)

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Slides or further information (optional)

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