NDLI-UNESCO International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library

Design (KEDL 2019) in association with IIT Delhi on the theme - “Smart and open
technologies for digital library
Held from 9th to 11th December 2019 at Seminar Hall, IIT Delhi
A report

At the outset, I would like to acknowledge the consent and the support given by the management
and the authorities to attend and participate in this symposium at IIT New Delhi. The NDLI-
UNESCO International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library Design 2019 in
association with IIT Delhi had come out with its second series of knowledge-sharing events
coordinated by the National Digital Library of India, scheduled on 9-11 December 2019 at Seminar
Hall- IIT Delhi, India.

The primary objective of these series was sharing of technical, policy, administration related
knowledge about digital library design. The first symposium of this series was held in October 2017
with a central theme of collaboration among digital libraries around the world. More than 30
speakers of international repute have deliberated on different aspects of digital library design.
Different deliberations and sessions converged to a crystalized thought: “Openness is the key to
mutual growth and sustenance”. This very thought had naturally become the theme of the second
version of the symposium: “Smart and Open Technologies for Digital Library”.

The NDLI-UNESCO International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library

Design 2019 focused on emerging technologies in a digital library, digital preservation; cultural
heritage, human aspect in DL service design, satellite programs, user engagement and content
strategy and modern information retrieval systems; knowledge engineering. To cover these topics
more than 20 eminent speakers presented their views.

The National Digital Library of India is a single-window platform that provides learning resources
intending to make e-learning and education accessible to all and to bring to users of all
demographics, digital repositories from India and the world. NDLI is a national mission on
education through the Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) project developed
by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, aided by the Ministry of Human Resource
Development (MHRD), Govt. of India.

The Inaugural session was chaired by Dr. Hezekiel Dlamini, Advisor for communication and
Information, UNESCO, New Delhi; Dr. Ramgopal Roa, Director IIT Delhi, Prof. Partha P.
Chakrabarti, PI, NDLI, IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Partha Pratim Das Jt. PI, NDLI & Professor, IIT
Kharagpur; Paul, Clough Prof. Search and Analytics, Information Schools, the University of
Sheffield and R. Subrahmanyam, Secretary (HE), MHRD, Govt. Of India was available through
Video Conferencing. (I was not able to attend this inaugural session completely as I was late and
reached almost at the concluding remarks of the inauguration session)

There were 9 sessions 20 eminent speakers; 2 experience sessions and 1 breakaway session at
UNESCO, New Delhi Office.

This symposium was unique as we were exposed to the various dimensions in which experts of the
multidisciplinary field of studies. The focus was on Open source software, open technologies and
open access. It gave us an overview of the upcoming technologies, the importance of
standardization; protocols for data mining; IPR and Copyright issues and handling the same;
Museumology, a virtual walkthrough of heritage sites declared by UNESCO.

9th December
The first session chaired by David Bainborg Professor of Computer Science, University of Waikato
and Director of the New Zealand Digital Library Research Project; Dr. Plaban Kumar Bhowmick,
Co-PI, NDLI & Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur gave the KEDL 2019 program Overview and
the way the thought process has gone into coming to the theme of the symposium and what is
expected as an outcome. Prof. Partha Pratim Das gave an overview of the Content and technologies
used in NDLI since its inception in April 2015 to its launching in June 2018 to till date. He
acknowledged the support received in the process from Europeana, RightsStatement.org and
UNESCO. He said NDLI reinforced its already strong research agenda to include support of Data,
metadata technologies like interfaces search and OCR for Indian Languages, Domains like Medical
and Law and AI Platform as a generic problem-solving tool. He shared his desire for support from
the Librarian Community in curating the data with standard vocabulary and taxonomy. The next
keynote was by Prasenjit Mitra,Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Associate
Dean for Research, Pennsylvania State University on Text Mining techniques in Digital
Libraries- he shared that in order to enable more efficient and improved search and eventually
question and answering, researchers have build text ming based tools. He gave an example of
Success in information extraction such as CiteSeer, ChemXSeer and ArchSeer. He then explained
how in order to enable scholars to find and read about related work, they have designed a
recommendation system called RefSeer. RefSeer takes an input a single title or an abstract/
paragraph of text, or even a whole text document. It suggests which documents should be cited
where. Furthermore it generates references for a document automatically and ranks them in the
order of their importance.

The Session 2 was chaired by Dr. Ravinder Kumar Chadha, Professor, LIS and Research Ex-
Additional Secretary, Parliament of India, LSS, New Delhi; the first keynote address was given by
Harry Willem Verwayen, Executive Director, Europeana Foundation -“Europeana Driving
Digital Transformation”. He shared about the Europeana platform – across Europe, museums,
galleries and archives digitize their collection. Europeana supports these organizations in their
digital transformation by making these collections available as widely as possible so that people can
find and use them. For work, for learning or just for fun. He added that Europeans contribute access
to valuable content resources to the fast-growing cultural and creative industries, but the sector is
seen more and more as an R&D lab, fertile soil an environment in which technological, behavioural
and organizational experimentation can take place in a relatively safe environment. He shared his
views on how NDLI and Europeana can work together towards standardization and access models.
The next was an Experience session 1 on Outreach Programs of Digital Libraries which was
moderated by Lisa Petrides, Founder and CEO of Institute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education(ISKME) and the Participants were – Partha Pratim Das (NDLI), Harry
Verwayen (Europeana), Muhammad Mezha-Ul-Islam (Bangladesh), Enno Meijers (NLN). The
sharing was on the basis that of real challenges in building and providing access to the National
Digital Libraries of Indian, Europeana, Bangladesh and New Zealand. Dr. Lisa concluded the
session by saying that all this needs to be purposeful else it will not be worth all the technological
innovations and funding it so huge without it being useful to the citizens, academicians and
Researchers globally.

Session 3 was chaired by Prasenjit Mitra, Professor of Information Sciences and Technology,
Associate Dean for Research, Pennsylvania State University. The first keynote session was on
“Introductory Note: Legal Aspects of NDLI” by Prof. Partha Pratim Das (NDLI) he shared about
the RightsStatements.org inclusion in NDLI and efforts being made in making this content
protected by Copyright and IPR for right utilization for the purpose of R&D. The next keynote
session was “Intellectual Property Rights Challenges for the Networking of Libraries,
Information and Knowledge Centres” by Prabuddha Ganguli,Visiting Prof., Rajiv Gandhi
School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur. In his address he shared the details of
RightsStatement.org and that it applies when Creative Commons License does not apply. The next
session was on “The World Digital Library: Lessons Learned and (Most Likely) Not Learned”
by John Van Oudenaren, Global Fellow, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies,
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, and former Director, World
Digital Library, Library of Congress; this session was over skype. Towards the end of the Session,
there were “Flash Talks for Students’ Poster Competition” where the students gave a minute
presentation on their posters which were based on various Open and smart technologies for
supporting Digital Libraries and improving search interfaces with multilingual and cross-
referencing and page ranking using all latest AI technologies.

10th December
On the Day 2 attended the UNESCO breakaway session on the theme -“Strengthening SAARC
through Digital Heritage”. In this session, Dr. Hezekiel Dlamini from UNESCO made welcome
remarks to the delegates and said that in SAARC although the nations are separated by political
boundaries that share a common heritage of several millennia political colonial past ethnicity long
tradition of economic and cultural exchanges and aspirations. For this reason, a mechanism
proposed promoting shared digital heritage in SAARC facilitated by UNESCO can greatly increase
regional cooperation the UNESCO memory of the world program was established in 1992 in
recognition of the growing awareness of the importance of preserving and assessing documentary
heritage around the world collections were and are still exposed to a variety of threats such as
illegal trade destruction natural disasters and loss of interest leaving them vulnerable to being lost.
Documentary heritage in institutions such as libraries, archives and museums constitute a
significant part of the memory of humanity and reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of
people. The issue of preserving this heritage has been a source of concern to governments and
experts who are familiar with its fragility and the ensuing risks of losing important sources of
information. In 2015 UNESCO member states adopted the recommendation concerning the
preservation of an access tool documentary heritage including in digital form. Although
nominations to the memory of the world program of UNESCO especially to its international register
original and national registers are not currently on hold. This nominative normative instrument is
designed to help build partnerships for developing appropriate solutions skills to mitigate against
risks faced by documentary heritage. So that valuable collections and records are never lost it
cannot be overemphasized that digital heritage systems need to be designed with inclusive
accessibility in mind; paying particular attention to information seekers and users with disabilities.
For instance, digital images and videos need to be accompanied by text or audio descriptions or
even sign language interpretation of their subjects key features eg content or form and should be
captured with the highest resolution possible so that they can be resizable bring them to the table
today for your consideration because we really should not leave anybody behind as we go forward
in our design of preserve preserving digital heritage UNESCO hopes that deliberations here will
lead to a proposal for the establishment of a digital heritage platform for the SAARC region. The
session was chaired by Ben Vershbow, Director Community Programme, Wikimedia Foundation;
he made his remarks on the theme of this session by saying that the work of collecting
heterogeneous data and making it interoperable; and creating the fluidity needs a lot of collaborative
efforts towards creating a global heritage. He also quoted the work done by Flickr Commons in this
direction and how they missed initially on the Metadata aspect and how Wikimedia is currently
working on aggregating the cultural heritage regionally at the local level and eventually trying to
build the global heritage. The keynote address was given by Prof. Partha Pratim Das (NDLI) on
“Digital Heritage to Strengthen SAARC – An Initiative for New Age Cooperation by
UNESCO and NDLI”

The second session was a Panel Discussion on “The State-of-the-Art in Digital Heritage and its
Role in Strengthening SAARC” chaired and moderated by Ramesh Gaur, Director (Library &
Information) & Head-Kalanidhi Division at IGNCA, Ministry of Culture. The panellists were - Md.
Mizanur Rahman, Microfilm Officer, Directorate of Archives and Libraries, Bangladesh
(Bangladesh); Aminath Shiuna, Director, Digitisation and Training Section, National Library of
Maldives, Maldives (Maldives); Saubhagya Pradhananga, Chief, National Archives of Nepal,
Nepal(Nepal); Udaya Cabral, Head Conservation & Preservation Division, National Library and
Documentation Service Board of Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka (Sri Lanka); Dilara Begum, Associate
Professor and Chairperson of Information Studies and Library Management Department and
Librarian (Acting) at East West University , Dhaka, Bangladesh (Bangladesh) and Partha Pratim
Das, Jt.-PI, National Digital Library of India, India (India). In this session, each representative
shared their journey and the status of the National Digital Libraries of the individual Countries and
the kind of support and funding they have received from their Government and ministries. In
Summarization and Action Plans by UNESCO / NDLI for SAARC Digital Heritage Platform
sessions the SAARC nation representatives shared the kind of support they need and the difficulties
they have been facing. Dr. Dlamini from UNESCO and Prof. Das of NDLI promised the support
they can provide to individual National Digital Library development and eventually shared
resources for a World Digital Heritage.

The third session was chaired by Dr. A.R.D. Prasad, Ex. Prof. DRTC, Bangalore; this was held back
at IIT Delhi in which the first keynote address “DBpedia and the Custody of Linked Open Data”
by Sebastian Hellmann, Director, Institute for Applied Informatics, e.V. In this address he stressed
on one of the most important properties of the Linked Data design and the largest knowledge graph
on earth – The LOD cloud. He shared that DBpedia was established over a decade ago and has
become the most successful Open Knowledge Graph. Further, he explained about the DBpedia's
new mission of Global and unified access to Knowledge Graphs. The next keynote address was on
“Building a More Inclusive Global Heritage Web with Wikimedia” by Ben Vershbow, Director
Community Programme, Wikimedia Foundation. In this address he talked about three overlapping
areas of opportunity for collaborating with Wikimedia – Using Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and
Wikisource to share describe and connect collections across all languages and cultures; encouraging
citizen collection and curation of heritage topics on Wikimedia sites through photography and
transcription projects, Wikipedia article writing and other content campaigns focused on increasing
representation; Identifying new ways for GLAM institutions to use the data produced on Wikimedia
projects to improve their own collections platforms and services. The next keynote address in this
session was on “Open & Contribution: Trends in Digital Libraries’ Engagement with Online
Community” by Liam Wyatt, Community Manager, Europeana Foundation in his presentation
helped us examine how digital libraries, in particular, are responding to the changing expectations
of the general public of what to be open and what it means to contribute. He then elaborated on the
aspect of “Open” and “Contribution” and “Participatory culture” in detail with examples.

The fourth session was chaired by Paul D Clough, Professor of Search and Analytics, University of
Sheffield; the first keynote address in this session was on “Building the Dutch Digital Heritage
Network” by Enno Meijers, IT Advisor , National Library of Netherlands; in this address, he gave
an introduction to the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) is a collaboration of all heritage
institutions in the Netherlands to develop a system of facilities and services to improve visibility,
usability and sustainability of digital heritage for all Dutch Citizens. In this talk, he shared about a
range of projects they initiated for improving the usability of digital heritage information and that
semantic web and distributed web technologies are at the core of their strategy. The Second session
was on “Place Vs. Space in Authority Data: Enhancing Library Retrieval through Geodetic
Search” by Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, Professor Dept of Library and Information Science at the
University of Kalyani; this session was interesting and was focused on the concept of
Georeferencing which allows both location and spatial relationships to be visualized in map
displays. He explained about the geodetic search framework is a kind of land-information system
that is also useful and can be applied in Solr based open source library discovery software namely
VuFind as retrieval system. The third keynote address was on “Social Media Integration of
Digital Libraries” by Greg Cram, Attorney, The New York Public Library. This session was on
Skype. He shared about the various Social media integration in Digital libraries of New York Public
Library. The effort is for deeper user engagement in all the aspects of the marketing of digital
library resources.

11th December
Day three had some of the most interesting sessions and keynote addresses. The first keynote
address was the most interesting in the conference on “Repertoires for Archives: reperforming
histories” by Sarah Kenderdine, Professor Digital Museology, Ecole Polytechni Ue Federale Le
Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Her presentation centred the theme based on G.D. Goode of the
Smithsonian Institute Lecture entitled “The future of the Museum” in which he said this future
museum would stand side by side with the Library and the Laboratory. Her presentation was on her
experiences and projects undertaken by her globally and she gave her account on the diverse
cultural heritage experiences of diverse archives from scientific artistic and humanistic perspectives.
Her discussion argued on the reformulations of engagement with digital archives at the intersection
of the tangible and intangible and as a convergence across domains. She also added that the
performative interfaces and repertoires decided demonstrate opportunities to reformulate narrative
in a digital context and the ways they support personal affective engagement with cultural memory.
She shared her experiences with the various projects she has done in India and globally. The second
keynote was on “Digital Reconstruction of the architectural evolution of Indic Temples across
south-east Asia” by Sambit Datta, Dean International Professor of Computational Urban Science
Curtin University, Perth, Australia. His talk centred around how the corpus of Indic Temples build
across South and Southeast Asia between 5th and the 9th centuries present an opportunity for the
computational study of both historical and geographical aspects of architectural development and
adaptation. His session helped us understand the importance of history, Vedas, the temple texts,
mathematics, pattern study and technological ideas in restructuring and restoring of Indic temples in
Soth-east Asia. The third Keynote was on the Indian case study of “Digital Preservation” by
Santanu Chaudhury, Director, IIT Jodhpur on the heritage site Hampi. His talk was on a structured
research effort for the development of technology and related translational initiatives to support the
reincarnation of our heritage realm. He described the challenges faced in the generation of replica in
the digital space of tangible and intangible ecological heritage. He also in his talk described the
emerging technologies like AI, IOT, AR and VR that can lead to transformational changes in
experiencing our heritage and culture. The fourth keynote was on “A musical progression with
Greenstone: how content analysis and linked data is helping redefining digital library
software architecture” by David Bainbridge, Professor of Computer Science , University of
Waikato; in this talk he highlighted on the digital resources that we have so far created in our
libraries are surprisingly static and disconnected from other online sources of information and
embody a “Read-only” mindset. In his talk taking a music digital library as an example and
leveraging from content analysis techniques and linked open data (LOD) he demonstrated a new
form digital library that encompasses management, discovery, delivery and processing of the
content it contains. He showed the usage of the open-source tools like Greenstone, audioDB and
Apache Jena I which together support the user for the musicological study. The next talk was on
“Scholarly Knowledge Graph” by Prasenjit Mitra, he explained how a two step query answering
and re-ranking procedure performed using citation networks containing papers, authors and venues
improve the quality of the retrieved answers. He also explained Korona, OAI- ORE, Semantic Web,
ORKG (Open Research Knowledge Graphs), MAKG (Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graphs)
and similar tools and technologies. In the next important keynote address by Paul, Clough Professor
of Search and Analytics, the University of Sheffield in his talk “Algorithmic Bias, transparency
and fairness: what is it, why does it matter and what's being done about it?” ; this was an
important and eye-opening presentation to all of us who believe that the pages are ranked
transparently based on the relevance. He instead said that increasingly algorithms are driving
information systems and services where they influence people's decision making and behaviours.
He explained how recently the academic research has shown negative effects of data-driven
methods such as discrimination and the reinforcement of social biases. Thus the talk helped us
review the bias and also about Microsoft's Fairness Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE)
in AI and potential technical solutions such as explainable AI and tools to assist the discovery and
prevention of data and algorithmic biases. The following keynote was on “Recognition and
Retrieval of Documents in Indian Scripts” by Jawahar C. V., Professor, Dean (RnD) & Amazon
Chair Professor, IIIT Hyderabad – his talk was on OCR's and its availability for Indian Languages
and his presentation was on a recent attempt in recognizing a large collection of Indian Language
Content mainly in three languages. And he also gave an overview of how recent advances in
Machine learning and Especially deep learning has opened up new promising directions in learning
effective and efficient representations for not only printed but also handwritten text. The last talk
was on “OER commons: accelerating the adoption of Open, adaptive and collaborative
education” by Lisa Petrides, Founder and CEO of Institute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education(ISKME). She explained that a digital library of Open educational
resources is one component of a broader approach to open education. Within OER commons, not
only are a vast array of digital resources available for users from around the world but users also
have access to the necessary tools and workflows to support the adaptation and personalization of
resources.

The last session was on Experience Session – 2 on the theme “Evaluation of Digital Libraries”
which was having the Moderator: Partha Sarathi Mukhopadhyay and Plaban Kumar Bhowmick
(NDLI), Liam Wyatt (Europeana), Parameswaran N (MHRD), Mary Ochs were the panellists. This
session gave summarised the status, way ahead and evaluation on the basis of its purposeful usage
Nationally and globally to boost the Academics and research endeavours collaboratively and with
the help of technologies like Machine learning, Deep Learning, Linked Open Data and
Standardization of Digital Libraries for Harvesting will make the entire effort worth it for the
generations to come and help in maintaining the Digital Heritage of the world too.

This symposium was a very useful one and gave me insights towards the possible future of Digital
Libraries and made me realize what a big responsibility we have in developing one for our own
University, City, region, state, Nation and as Global partners to boost research and learning.

Dr. Sheetal Tank

Librarian
Glimpses