সাহায্য:ডিজিটাল লাইব্রেরী অব ইন্ডিয়া

Digital Library of India

Guidelines to downloading files from the Digital Library of India

The Digital Library of India is managed by multiple institutes under the Government of India. It is a member of the Universal Digital Library. Books are collected from source libraries all over India and scanned at the designated scanning center for that region (usually the local branch of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing). The site is hosted at two places (mirror sites): http://dli.gov.in/ hosted by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, and http://www.dli.ernet.in/ hosted by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The DLI contains scans of a huge number of books, but the site is not at all user friendly. One can go to the DLI homepage and search for a title or author. That search result is not displayed under a separate webpage address; so the search cannot be saved or bookmarked by the user. DLI does not have a standard spelling system; so search requires a bit of brain. If you search for Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, you will get his Bengali works. For the English works, the search string should be Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. If you search for Bankim Chandra, you will get both varieties. If you remove the space and search for Bankimchandra, you will get another list of Bengali works, because, in Bengali, space is not used between first and middle names. Once you get the list, suppose you want The Poison Tree. If you follow the link, you will see that the webpage address is highly cumbersome: http://dli.gov.in/cgi-bin/metainfo.cgi?&title1=The%20Poison%20tree&author1=Bankim%20Chandra%20Chatterjee&subject1=Literature&year=1884%20&language1=english&pages=380&barcode=5990010895645&author2=&identifier1=null&publisher1=T.fisher%20unwin%20London&contributor1=null&vendor1=NONE&scanningcentre1=iiit,%20allahabad&slocation1=NONE&sourcelib1=Bharti%20Bhawan%20Library%20Allahabad&scannerno1=8388607&digitalrepublisher1=Digital%20Library%20Of%20India&digitalpublicationdate1=&numberedpages1=&unnumberedpages1=&rights1=null&copyrightowner1=&copyrightexpirydate1=&format1=TIFF%20&url=/data58/upload/0097/362

Obviously, such an address cannot be cited anywhere. So you need to edit it. You can remove the unnecessary details and change it to http://dli.gov.in/cgi-bin/metainfo.cgi/data58/upload/0097/362?&barcode=5990010895645 -- this will work just fine. But this kind of address will vary from work to work, so you cannot make it a formula. For formula-type address, you can use http://dli.gov.in/cgi-bin/DBscripts/allmetainfo.cgi?barcode=5990010895645, where only the barcode needs to be changed. But this formula-address may sometimes be defective, the link to the actual address may not lead anywhere. But the edited address shown first will work always.

Now, the actual work. It is in TIF format. You need a plug-in (see here for Windows) to see the pages. Now you can view the work page-by-page and save the pages as TIF images. This is of course very time consuming. How to download the whole work in PDF? Download DLI Downloader 0.24 Lite from this site and you are on. Just enter the barcode and download the book. If the downloader says that scan does not exist (may happen because of the presence or absence of "new" or "new1" at the start of the web address), then go to the Collection option and toggle between IISc and IUCAA. If your connection is slow, use safe mode. Experts can use more complicated tools found here.

Pdf format books in DLI are available here. Bengali book catalogue is available here and here.