Mohammad Ishaq Lone

Oriental manuscripts in India: a literature survey

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature about oriental manuscript collections in India and provide an overview of the area.Design/methodology/approach – A core set of literature on oriental manuscript collections in India was retrieved after doing a thorough literature search in different databases. Literature on various aspects of this topic was reviewed. The paper is organized based on various themes to make the study fruitful for various sections of society.Findings – Oriental manuscripts are present in different research libraries, university libraries and public libraries in India but university libraries are leading others in preserving these manuscripts, with few exceptions. Manuscripts are available in different oriental languages but mostly in Sanskrit. Every religious sect in India has contributed immensely in collecting and preserving these manuscripts. The contribution of famous kings of Indian history is also enormous in this regard.Research limitations/implications – ...

Digital Library of Kashmiri Willow Wicker Items: A Small Step towards Preservation of Culture

The handicrafts of Kashmir are famous throughout the world. Kashmiri willow wicker items are losing market due to the negligence from the stakeholders of the state. This craft needs to be revamped in order to preserve our cultural heritage. The present study is a small effort in this regard and attempts to show how the culture can be preserved in this modern age with the help of electronic media. A detailed survey was conducted to find out the products made by willow wicker. All the product-related information to these products was accumulated in the form of a digital library. In this study, Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) software was used to gather the documents containing information related to each item of willow wicker for easy retrieval using various access points.

Digital Library of India: Development So Far

All around the world many digital library initiatives have taken place, which look after the digitised content. In India, such an effort known as Digital Library of India (DLI) has been started. Many digitisation centres have been located around the country, which submit the digitised content to the DLI, which are funded by The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), Government of India. The initial target of the mission is one million books. So far much development has occurred and this paper tries to peep into this development.