Digitization of Rare Books including Repository & Retrieval System and Portal for West Bengal Secretariat Library

The principal objective of the project is to preserve the old and heritage books and documents available at West Bengal Secretariat Library, Government of West Bengal for dissemination. It involves digitization process, thereafter putting the digitized content in the repository and retrieval system. One can access the digitized documents through the web portal. Most of these books and documents either have been unfortunately destroyed partly or going to be destroyed due to improper preservation. It is essential to preserve the remaining books and documents in electronic media through the process of digitization for the benefit of posterity. In the process of digitization, it is possible to make the facsimile (in multiple copies) of the original documents easily and can preserve those at different locations. Moreover, this method of preservation will add a great value to the Heritage, Cultural and Political works of mankind.

The digitization part of the solution provides scanning of the invaluable heritage materials with appropriate scanners and makes them digital objects after proper cleaning and cropping. The digital objects has been preserved based on extended Dublin Core metadata and is stored in a Digital Object Repository System in TIFF and PDF/A formats only.

Retrieval System Software consists of a search engine which provides metadata based search of the stored digital objects with navigation facility. Metadata fields is restricted to a maximum of 20 in number which has been jointly decided by West Bengal Secretariat Library and C-DAC, Kolkata. The system has maximum efficiency in the Repository and Retrieval System. At the same time it is easy to understand and use.

The system is designed to have metadata entry, update, deletion of duplicate digital objects and a workflow of verification process. It offers standard Role-based User Management modules. It has standard backup facility along with import and export facility.

Use Cases

• User Management
• Metadata Management & Retrieval
• Duplicate Deletion
• Data Indexing
• Content Navigation

Salient Features

The software has two parts

1. A Web-based Digital Object Repository and Retrieval System
2. A Web Portal

Features of Web-based Digital Object Repository and Retrieval System

• Role Based User Management
• Metadata entry, integrity check, update and deletion.
• Metadata Extraction in Extended Dublin Core Standard
• Metadata-based search and retrieval
• Unicode compliant
• Provision for database backup.
• XML parser /Import module.
• Content navigation facility.
• Dissemination with the use of advanced search engine
• Scalability
• Backup & Recovery
• Platform independence
• Inter operability
• Audit Trail

Features of Web Portal

• A single point of access to the application and information.
• Portal has navigable pages.
• Each page contains a nesting of sub-pages or one or more portlets (individual windows that display anything from static HTML content to complex dynamic content).
• Contact Us having addresses and contact details of prominent personalities
• Web-based Search facilities
  • Search, based on metadata has two categories for viewing contents.
  • Browse the collection
    • Book Title beginning with - (list of alphabets – A to Z)
    • Author’s Last Name - (list of alphabets – A to Z)
    • Year (links providing group of year between – e.g. 1500-1600 … 1941-1963...)
    • Subject (links providing name of subjects e.g. – Astronomy, Biology, etc.)
    • Languages (links providing name of languages e.g. – Chinese, English, Bengali, etc.)
  • Advanced Search based on combination of the following criteria:
    • Title
    • Author
    • Subject
    • Language
    • Year