Repository Of Indian National Agricultural Research & Education System (NARES): Open Access To Institutional Knowledge

Indian National Agricultural Research & Education System (NARES) is a huge repository of knowledge and information on crop sciences, horticulture, resource management, animal sciences, agricultural engineering, fisheries, agricultural extension and agricultural education. Digital technologies and online access to information resources have brought increased expectation from library and information services. For researchers, fast access to existing scientific outputs and archived scholarly information on his topic of interest is as crucial as current scientific knowledge. ‘KrishiKosh’ is the institutional repository aiming to hold all the intellectual outputs of the Indian NARES system in the form of digitized institutional publications, technical reports, annual reports, lectures, authors collection in the form of preprints, reprints, old books etc. These contents to which one can easily have open access, essentially captures all the intellectual work being done under NARES. The same intellectual output when gets published in the form of research papers in the commercial journals become less accessible due to high cost. Thus institutional repository provides alternative source of scientific information to support quality research and teaching in line with objectives of open learning and OER. ‘KrishiKosh’ has been created under the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) and digitization of the valuable content was taken up by four major institutions of Indian NARES, namely, Acharya N G Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad; Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi; Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Izatnagar; and University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru. Using Open Source software, the material in the repository was organized into Institution-wise collection of documents such as books, journals, theses, reports, articles etc. The process of digitization including scanning, cleaning, cropping, conversion to text (OCR), conversion to PDF/A (an open ISO standard). Finally, metadata tagging and uploading the fully searchable digital items in the repository has been done for about 9 million pages comprising about 20,000 documents. To make searches more relevant, ‘Agrotags’ which is a carefully selected subset of ‘Agrovoc’ of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been integrated with KrishiKosh.