Digital library provides an excellent opportunity to widely disseminate our documentary heritages and greatly increases access to library collections of rare documents as well as current research literature. Indian digital library initiatives aim at producing a vast amount of digitized documents pertaining to different forms of recorded human knowledge, ranging from the rare manuscripts to current research literature. Digitized documents are made accessible in online information systems either through intranet or Internet channels. However, maintaining an Internet-based online digital library system has several problems such as availability of web server for 24X7 timeframe, robust broadband connectivity, efficient retrieval engine, ownership of digitized documents, etc. This chapter tries to address and document some of the prevailing social networking issues affecting Indian digital library initiatives, particularly the collaboration patterns among participating institutions as well as funding agencies. This chapter also tries to identify social relationships amongst the networked institutions in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. This chapter shows how social networks in the collaborative digital libraries play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individual projects succeed in achieving their goals. Digital Library of India (DLI) is the largest digitization initiative in India spreading across states of India and involving over ninety organizations to ensure several thousands of rare books written in Indian languages as well as non-Indian languages are accessible through Internet channel. This chapter critically appraises the formation of a formal social network in the DLI project embracing local memory institutions across the states of India as well as the funding agencies. Similarly, this chapter also critically analyses and elaborates another collaborative digital library initiative in India, namely, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).
Research on Efficient Retrieval Technology of Optical Characteristics of Image Resources in Digital Library
