Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – the South Asian Scenario

This is a very impressive book in terms of the progress towards open access in South Asia, in particular in India. It is primarily a directory of 17 digital library initiatives, six open courseware initiatives, six open access journals projects, five metadata harvesting services, six national level repositories, and 19 institutional repositories. These vary considerably in size but some are huge: the Digital Library of India covered 108,000 books with 32 million pages in November 2007 and Open J‐Gate provides access to 4,300 plus journals and over a million article records. Many of the systems are multilingual and several are multi‐script.

The high‐tech image is reinforced by the full‐colour production on quality paper with photographs of the Vainu Bappu Observatory with Asia's largest telescope and the Saras 2 aircraft developed by the Indian National Aerospace Laboratories. Quite a contrast to traditional western perceptions of South Asia!

There are high ideals for “open access” (which is not defined but seems to mean access over the internet). The conclusion claims that “open access to information and knowledge not only enables digital inclusion of common citizens, particularly under‐privileged communities, but also bridges social divides”.

The book does not aim to be critical, but there is a mention in the Librarians' Digital Library that the encryption and security may cause some users accessibility problems. The conclusion states somewhat delicately that “too often the open access portal in an institution may remain non‐functional due to some internal dynamics”. It is also recorded that initially the universities were reluctant to create repositories of PhD theses because they would be subjected to critical analysis by national and international peers. Open access would motivate them to maintain international standards.

There is not much technical detail of the various systems or standards used, but most applications are compliant with OAI‐PMH and indexed by OAIster and OpenDOAR. The predominant software packages for e‐libraries, where stated, are Greenstone and Dspace.

Unfortunately, the attractive appearance of the book is let down by the poor binding. I shall have to put the loose pages in some sort of binder for future reference. Reference would also be made easier if an index had been provided: the “index” on pages 133‐5 is in fact more of a list of contents. Hopefully improvements in network capacity between South Asia and elsewhere will make it easier for those of us elsewhere to make use of the services.