Dear Colleagues,
I visited the Digital Library of India with interest. This is a wonderful
work for which many organisations within India have come together. Every
individual involved in the project and the organisations, the leadership -
every one - needs to be congratulated. I have few suggestions for kind
consideration to the concerned. Please consider these not as criticism but
for improvement of the facility.
1. The home page seem to have been worked out for 17" monitors. I am using
15" monitor and unable to see what is on the right - the screen is not
scrolling (after RFP in the menu). But can this page be set to fit any size
screen? (I am IE user).
2. My mother tongue being Marathi, I opted for that language option and 'any
centre' to search documents that have been scanned. To my surprise, I
noticed that some items which are not Marathi have been listed under this
output. For example,
- Kind Words: For His Young Friends. William. 0. Marathi. Philosophy. 183
pgs. SEEM TO BE ENGLISH TEXT
-Yadhnyawlkyasmruthi. ParchureJaganathaRaghunath. 1914. Marathi. Sanskrit.
523 pgs. SEEM TO BE IN SANSKRIT ONLY.
3. I also noticed that many titles on the first page of this search are
repeating several times. Probably it is essential to check whether the
records are duplicated.
4. I also think that we should not forget the accuracy of bibliographic
description (metadata in new terminology). See the Author statement in the
second title above. There are no spaces and punctuation between last and
other names. We must follow some cataloguing standards - CCC, AACR -
whatever is the decision. It can be understood if the centre is managed by
non-library staff. But if I am correct, this work in Pune University is done
in the library.
5. I happened to open first 35 pages of the second title
(Yadhnyawlkyasmruthi - to find out whether there is any Marathi therein) and
noticed a difference in time required for opening each page. Earlier pages
were opened quickly whereas the subsequent pages took some time. My
experience needs to be confirmed from other places and other documents.
6. For some of the books, there was no access. I presume that the meta info
is available for all scanned items but the books that are open are the ones
out of publisher's copyright. Rest are yet to be opened. But in such case, I
propose that let there be an info that the access to this book is restricted
than getting browser error on the page.
7. The software provides option to view the page in tif, html and text
format. But the documents I tried open only in tif format. Same is the case
with the transliterate option. I think the software should mask such
features if the documents do not permit these options.
Regards,
-Tapaswi
----- Original Message -----
From: "Subbiah Gunasekaran"
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