LAUSR

National Digital Library of India: Democratizing Education in India educational content, including books, lecture videos, research articles, and more in over 100 languages, including several vernaculars used throughout the country. In pre-NDLI era, there were many isolated initiatives on digital education in the country, including the growing number of institutional repositories with their disparate metadata schema, archives of video lectures such as NPTEL,b and national thesis repositories like Sodhganga.c NDLI provided the long-awaited integration among them by becoming the common portal through which each of them is seamlessly accessible. In the international scenario, while many major digital libraries such as Europeana, DPLA, Canadiana, Trove, World Digital Library, and Digital NZ focus on culture and heritage, NDLI, respecting national need, has been designed to focus on the educational space. Unlike general-purpose search engines, NDLI indexes only educational resources based on their corresponding metadata. NDLI also exposes several filters that allow the user to refine search results based on educational metadata (for example, subject domain, educational level, educational degree, and learning resource type). This helps users to express and iteratively refine their search intent using precise metadata values—a feature missing in generalpurpose search engines. Figure 1 shows the NDLI interface: it offers both browse and search options; the user can customize the retrieved results using metadata-based filters visible on either side of the interface. Many of the educational resources in NDLI are organized into col lections, for example, schoolbooks are organized into curriculum, thereby allowing users to easily discover related resources. One of the other exclusive features of NDLI is free access to special resources like South Asia Archive, the World eBook Library, and the digitized ‘red books’ of the Oscar-winning film-