Universal Digital Library

UDL or the Universal Digital Library seeks to digitize books of common interest to different Communities of Interest (COI) and make them available in a manner that is independent of language, location and time. A complete solution for this was developed by Carnegie-Mellon University, USA involving state-of-the-art planetary scanners for scanning, cropping, OCR and XML converting.

But the massive efforts and overall costs involved in selecting the books, manpower and hardware make it prohibitively expensive for any one nation to execute the project by itsef. Thus it involves the participation of several countries including the USA and China. The Overall Internation Co-ordinator for this project is Prof. Raj Reddy of CMU and Such an international collaboration also ensures that no duplication of efforts is involved while capitalizing on the digital form of the information that can easily be shared and accessed.

The co-ordinator for the Indian effort is Prof N. Balakrishnan, Chairman, Division of Information Sciences and Services at the Indian Institute of Science.
Other Indian institutions involved in this project are
- IISc
- NCST Mumbai
- IIIT Hyderabad