National Digital Library

There are in India many organizations, institutions and writers having a collection of books and periodicals, pamphlets and occasional publications related to tribal development, society, culture, history and ethnography, etc. However, there is no single library or archival collection in the country with all of this material at one place. The lack of adequate educational and research resource has adversely affected the quality of research and instruction in university courses related to tribal communities. Given that the Library Networks like INFLIBNET and ‘South Asian Studies Resources’ are now available, it will be an extremely easy and effective to bring together digitally the library resources available across the country. This ‘national collection’ can in turn be made accessible to all universities, research centre and individual researchers in the country. In doing so, one could track any research related to Indian tribal communities being carried out in any part of the world, and can actually put to use the results of the research. Creating a National Digital Library on Tribal studies will also help in avoiding replication of research efforts and research funding.
The Academy has in its collection more than 30,000 books periodicals and research articles related to tribal communities in nearly 30 languages. The Academy has started digitizing this material and plans to continue with the digitization process for the next three to four years so that a National Corpus gets built.