Indo-Bhutan e-Library: a Government of India funded project
Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Sh. Narendra Modi during his visit to Bhutan in June 2014 announced Government of India’s assistance for establishment of e-Library / Digital Library in Bhutan which will make accessible the educational contents for students across Bhutan in a reliable way with implementation of the modern IT Technologies. The project envisages students of Bhutan to get access to world class education content to attain more knowledge and information about the whole world through the ICT technology. e-Library is a focused collection of digital objects (digitally born or digitized) that includes text, visuals, video, audio, etc. stored as standardized and customized electronic media formats (as opposed to print, micro form, or other media), along with means for organizing, storing, and retrieving the contents from the e-library repository. e-Contents in electronic formats from various sources are collected, stored and organized on this e-Library portal for blending with the methods of pedagogy to deliver e-Education to students. This e-Library portal provides a framework to access (online and offline) collaborative e-content from central repository or local cache for utilization by students, scholars, teachers and other citizens in the form of e-books, rich media, audio, video, animations and other innovative contents. The framework would provide anytime-anywhere access to the e-contents through desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, etc. It has various sections differentiating the various kinds of content uploaded based on standards, categories, age groups, etc. It also provides a platform to organize the e-books for school students to address the major problems faced by students (burden of school books), publishers (logistical problem, book publishing, delivery, etc.) and concerned education agencies (cycle of content editing/ changes). The students would be benefitted by better exposure to knowledge through learning aids and resources, access to richer media contents, real life examples through realistic videos, etc. The schools would have advantages such as to provide teachers with a chance to choose and bundle content according to their teaching methods, provide exposure to peer groups teaching aids, content, books etc., aid schools with lesser teaching resources to gain from the resources of better schools, provide teachers who contribute content/generate more relevant collections nation-wide visibility, etc. The content on this e-library portal could be broadly classified in two categories, first that was created in a digital format, known as born-digital which could be a collection of texts, images, etc. so as to be stored, retrieved and read over devices like computers, mobile, digital readers, etc. The second form of content are as information that has been converted from a physical medium, e.g. paper, Journals, books, audio-video, etc. by digitizing.