KrishiKosh
Under National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) an initiative was taken through sub project “Strengthening of Digital Library and Information Management under NARES (e-GRANTH)” at ICAR-IARI, New Delhi as a lead centre to provide digital access to different library resources for National Agricultural Research & Education System in India which comprises of Agricultural Research Institutions and Agricultural Universities. Under this initiative digital repository ‘Krishikosh’ and digital library platform ‘IDEAL’ has been developed for capturing, digitizing & online sharing of the library resources in order to cater to the increasing need of the scientific/research/teaching community.
Krishikosh - is a digital repository of accumulated knowledge in agriculture and allied sciences, having collection of old and valuable books, old journals, thesis, research articles, popular articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, pamphlets, brochures, bulletins and other grey literatures spread all over the country in different ICAR Research Institutions and State Agricultural Universities (SAUs). Under the ICAR's Open Access policy, Krishikosh provides ready software platform to implement all aspects of the open access policy, similar to ‘Cloud Service’ for individual institution’s self-managed repository with central integration. These two products of E-Grant (i) Krishikosh and (ii) IDEAL are used by all SAUs/DUs/CUs & ICAR Institutes.
In the last ten months, 50 more Institutes / SAUs has been added in the Krishikosh repository, 83 SAU’s / ICAR institutes are registered in Krishikosh. Currently this repository has more than 83,000 articles items which include more than 35,000 theses.
Salient Features of Krishikosh
- Krishikosh is digital repository platform capable of Decentralized Management of Content but Centralized Hosting and maintenance for convenience of multiple users.
- Each institution has its own repository with full control without botheration of maintaining hardware/software which is centrally managed at ICAR-IARI, New Delhi.
- Krishikosh Institutional repository of NARES provides open access to institutional knowledge. Krishikosh has been developed by customizing open source software Dspace.
- At present Krishikosh has more than 20 million digitized pages in 83,000 digital items (volumes) like old books, old Journals, reports, proceedings, reprint, research highlights, training manuals, historical records.
- Includes more than 35,000 Ph.D and M.Sc. theses submitted by various ICAR Institutes / SAUs and with full Text searchable facilities.
- Krishikosh provides ready software platform, similar to ‘Cloud Service’ for individual institution’s self-managed repository with central integration of all individual repositories.
- It is full text searchable open access repository. Semantic search enabled through the integration of Agrotags.
- Comprehensive search and browse options are available.
- Easy to register for additional facilities.
- User feedback provision for continuous improvement.
- Subscribed users can get collection updates.
- Institutional users can administer their own repository and can upload, remove, set embargo on their institutional content.
