C-DAC, Kolkata is the Regional Mega Scanning Centre, established in 2005 by DeitY, MC&IT, Govt. of India, for digitization and preservation of Rare and Copyright free Books & Manuscripts available at Eastern and North-eastern part of the country. The aim is to create a portal of Heritage Books and Manuscripts of India, which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge.

As a first step in realizing this mission, it is aimed to create the Digital Library of India with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, predominantly in Indian languages, available to everyone over the Internet. This portal will also become an aggregator of all the knowledge and digital contents created by other digital library initiatives in India. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to socioeconomic background or nationality.

Resources and Solutions available for Digital Preservation :

• Scanning Infrastructure for Digitization of the Collections of Libraries, Archives and Museums.
• Terabyte Data Storage Facility.
• Automated Microfilm Processing Lab to convert Digital Content into Microfilm.
• Gramophone Records Digitization Technology Solution.
• Software Module for Repository and Retrieval system conforming to OAIS Framework.
• Repository of more than One Lac Rare and Copy-right Free Books and Manuscripts comprising to 40 Million pages.
• Baul Song Repository and Retrieval System using open source architecture (FEDORA) as a folklore of a society introduced by Nobel Laureate Gurudeva Rabindranath Tagore.
• Bengali OCR with above 90% character level accuracy on trained singular size front with unattended batch conversion mode.
• Trained Manpower with experience of 10 years in Digital Library Service and Research.
• On line Retrieval of Digitized Books through www.dli.ernet.in portal.

Users / Beneficiaries :

• DeitY, Govt. of India for for Digital Library of India initiatives.
• Most of the Libraries and Archives of Eastern and North Eastern States.
• Museums and Libraries of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan under Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India.
• Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation under Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India.
• Hospitals of Govt. of West Bengal.
• Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.
• Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Free Access of Rare Collections of Human Knowledge to Present anf Future Generations.

Ongoing Activities :

• Digital Library for North Eastern States - Content Creation, Storage and Access.
• Archival of Rare Books of Govt. of India Department.

Past Activities :

• Being the Regional Mega Scanning Centre has already digitized over 40 Million pages from above 1,00,000 Rare & Copyright Free books by installing the Book Scanners at different Library premises throughout the Eastern and North Eastern States. Those books have already uploaded in the website and available in the http://www.dli.ernet.in.
• Microfilming of over 3 Million pages of Rare Collections of Nobel Laureate Gurudeva Rabindranath Tagore.
• Digitization of 1,500 old Gramophone Records.
• Development of web portal for North Eastern state libraries with the digitized content of Rare Books available to their libraries.
• Developed a Digital Content Repository for Books, Manuscript and Audio-Visual Performance of Baul Songs using Open Source Software "Fedora" with over 1,00,000 Books / Journals and 250 Baul Songs with Metadata-based search & retrieval.
• Bengali OCR with above 90% character level accuracy on trained singular size font has been developed and unattended batch mode conversion is also possible.