News Media initiative to developing digital repository from public contribution: A case of SDPL Nepal

Abstract

Digital repositories have been mushrooming all around the world, but it is still rare in the developing countries like Nepal due to technological, economical and infrastructural constraints. A consortium was formed with different professionals and organizations to develop a public repository in Nepal. This initiative was fueled by the growing interest of people on new technology after they showed high degree of immunity to natural disaster during 2015 mega earthquake. This paper discusses about the challenges and the solutions employed to build digital repository in hard economic and technological constraints.

The news media - Voice of Library advocated and motivated stakeholders and public for the support and contribution. The repository is built with volunteer efforts, without the help from major donors. The project used old donated computers, open source software, and volunteers. The core team digitizes books, maintain the infrastructure and manage the submitted items. Harvesting web might seem easiest and obvious way for developing contents to the eyes of hi-tech community, it was however, not viable with the limited resources. Most of the collections are contributed by public and some books donated by the publishers and authors. Repository contains digital manuscripts, datasets, articles, books, news and other materials. The volunteers filter, classify, and tag the contents. The automatic keyword harvester is also used and similar items are recommended using these words. It is hosted in intranet and not fully online till now.

It was found that the collection growth was very slow. It took 4 full time volunteers, 23 part time volunteers and over 750 contributors a full year to collect around 6100 items. This article shares the legal, managerial, technological, economical, and ideological challenges and mistakes. It also shares lessons learnt and measures taken to cope with limitations and mistakes, which could be useful for people trying to establish similar repositories.