SOME WORDS :

A library is basically a bank of knowledge. Preservation and distribution of knowledge is a continuous process. “Tamosho Ma(m) Jyotirgamaya” (Sumambonum and highest good) and “Atmo Mabo Bhabo” (Search your root, Search your passion, Search your mind) —the journey from darkness to light and this is what spurred him. In fact, the altered situation and explosion of Information Technology has changed the life style of the people. On the other hand the scope of study has decreased and hence the necessity of a ready to access online library.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) once said — “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Undaunted, they debated until the choice was unanimous — appreciation of art and culture. It wasn’t a difficult choice since art & culture have always been very dear to Bengal’s heart. No one can deny the fact that the giants of Bengal not only reformed and enriched India but also have nourished the consciousness of the rest of the world. The thoughts of these luminaries are best expressed in the native language, Bengali.

In 1979 Jyoti Bandyopadhyay, then a student of Scottish Church College (Class XI) came in contact with Dr. Alok Ray, an eminent Educationist,

Researcher of Nineteenth Century and the then Head of the Department of Bengali of the same college. He occasionally visited the residence of Dr. Ray where he found a big personal library stuffed with old and valuable books inspiring him immensely. He felt the urge of collecting and preserving them. Jyoti Bandopadhyay started to collect books, journals, images from old bookshops (boipara purono boier dokan) of College Street area and from his friend circle as well to gradually develop a personal book bank. That effort gave birth to the concept of Bengali e-library (www. www.banglalibrary.org).

We live in a hectic world that is full of opportunity but consumed by materialism and restlessness to the point of insanity. At the end of the day, we retreat into a culture whose lyric almost therapeutically soothes our nerves and helps us readjust our mind to the true meaning of life — life that discerns substance from superficiality, happiness from restlessness and, above all, commitment to family from individual hedonism. So in a world immersed in materialism where technological advancement has exceeded humanity. Atulprasad aptly understood the importance of the language and created some immortal songs “Moder garab moder asha, a mori Bangla bhasa.” — (Our pride, our hope, O our language Bengali!)

WHY BANGLALIBRARY :

The golden past vanishes away from the rude reality of our busy life. There is not enough time to search for it. If one presents this everlasting universal golden days with decoration, nobody can deny it. The golden past that strengthens the future, emerges through library, which can be called as the intersection of past, present and future.

We want to highlight the golden period of Bengali Literature, which is also the golden era of Indian culture, spanning from 1850 to 1950. The innumerable Bengalees who had to leave their motherland and spread all over are our valuable members. They want to retrieve their culture and search their roots eagerly.

We want to present that forgotten immemorial past into their grasp. The outlook and characteristics of library has changed according to time and nature of thought. So, e-library was born.

MISSION :

The main aim is to initiate a portal for the first Bengali Digital Image based Library of India, which will highlight not only Bengali Literature but literature of all Indian languages as such, to promote creativity and an insight to human knowledge and their eternal thirst for that.

This e-library is expected to contain more than a million books relating Bengali literature as well as literature in all other Indian languages in the portal with a free-to-read and easy to access through the Internet. This portal will be the harbinger of knowledge. It will be the fore-bearer of all other digital library initiatives in India, which can be accessed by anybody living anywhere in the world 365x24x7 irrespective of color, creed, politics and socioeconomic background.

One of the main priorities of this Image based digital library will be to provide the end user with fragrance and real life images of the pages of old books supported with full Rich Text Format indexing and searching based on data conversion or OCR (Optical Character Recognition). It will be a very special on-line facility for researchers and students who intend to delve deep into human knowledge, their mind, root and passion quickly and reliably. This particular portal will be an excellent launch pad for language processing in the avenues like machine translation, optical character recognition, summarization, intelligent indexing, speech and hand writing recognition and information retrieval in any Indian languages.

It is impossible to find more than 25,000 books being housed in a typical high school or college library and more than one million books in a good library, which is hardly a fraction of the books that are available. It is a unique e-library conceived and created Jyoti Bandyopadhyay, an ex-associate editor of a very well known daily based in Kolkata. We are sure that this Image based Digital Library will be recognized all over the world for its authenticity, integrity and availability of the data.

VISION :

For the first time in history, all the significant literary, artistic and scientific works of mankind can be digitally preserved and made freely available not only for our education, study, appreciation but for our future generations also in every nook and corner of the world.

But until now, the transmission of our cultural heritage has depended on limited number of copies available in the fragile media. The fires of Alexandria irrevocably severed our access to any of the works of the ancient scholars. In a thousand years, only a few of the paper documents we have today will survive the ravages of deterioration, loss, and outright destruction. With no more than 10 million unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 100 million since the beginning of recorded history—the task of preservation is much larger. With new digital technology, though, this task is within the reach of a single concerted effort for the public good, and this effort can be distributed to libraries, museums, and other groups in all countries.

Existing archives of paper have many shortcomings. Many other works still in existence today are rare, and only accessible to a small population of scholars and collectors at specific geographic locations. A single wanton act of destruction can destroy an entire line of heritage. Furthermore, contrary to the popular beliefs, the libraries, museums, and publishers do not routinely maintain broadly comprehensive archives of the considered works of man. No one can afford to do this, unless the archive is digital. Even the publishers are also reluctant to reprint old works given the poor returns which are in great demand with researchers, a site of digital library will be a goldmine to them.

Digital technology can make the works of man permanently accessible to the billions of people all over the world. Great philanthropists, and visionary information scientists in past centuries have recognized the great potential of public libraries to improve the quality of life and provide opportunity to the citizenry. A language independent digital library, widely available through free access on the Internet, will improve the global society in ways beyond measurement.

The technological advances today make it possible to think in terms of storing all the knowledge of the human race in digital form by the year 2008.

GOALS :

General belief is that it is impossible to capture all books in Rich Text Format even in hundreds of years and it was our primary objective, although a long term one, to convert the images (pages of the books) into RTF. Hence we had to convince ourselves as to the feasibility of the project and we started by undertaking the task of converting as many books as possible in a short span of time and make it a continuous and ongoing process by using the latest technology and we firmly believe that it will revolutionize the process of education in much of the world.

Libraries are unevenly distributed around the world and within each country. In the U.S. the NCES Survey noted that in 1996, 3,408 of 3,792 institutions of higher education had libraries holding 806.7 million volumes. The 112 largest university libraries in the United States and Canada each have at least 1.8 million books. They are members of the Association for Research Libraries. Massachusetts has about 25 million volumes; New York has about 31 million volumes, and California has about 40 million volumes in their ARL Libraries (Association for Research Libraries, 1999/2000). Other states, such as North and South Dakota, have no large libraries. A few large public libraries have several million volumes. However, most junior colleges, high schools, and public libraries have much smaller collections. Making this large knowledge repository can revolutionize research at all levels of education and give a much-needed boost at minimal cost to our national educational infrastructure. This impact will be further enhanced given the convenience of on-line access, and the benefit of full text searching at word and phrase levels.

A secondary benefit of on-line search is to make locating the relevant information inside of books far more reliable and much easier. Student’s success in finding exactly what they seek will increase and increased success will enhance student willingness to perform research using this large resource. NCES reports that 84 percent of libraries around the country are open between 60 and 80 hours a week. This image based digital library would be open all the 168 hours the week on a 24x7x365 basis. More than one individual will be able to use the same book at the same time. Thus, popular works will not be checked out and thus unavailable to others.

BENEFITS :

The principal benefit of the bengali e-library will be to supplement the formal education system by making knowledge available to anyone who can read and has access to internet. Libraries have played a vital role in the advancement of human society. Societal advance depends on young people having access to books via libraries and other means. We expect that making this unique web resource available free to everyone around the world will enhance the learning process.

MEMBERSHIP :
Initially everybody will be able to log on to our website and whoever satisfies our required criteria will be treated as a Subscriber of our library and entitled to surf the site, see and download certain pages of the book free of charge.

FREE DOWNLOAD :
All Subscribers will be allowed to download certain pages of any book free of charge.

FULL DOWNLOAD :
Under this option Subscriber will be allowed to download any books that will fulfill the online donation criteria.

In case of copyrighted books even the Subscriber who fulfill the Online Donation Criteria, will have to donate the price mentioned therein.

DONATION :
Our Organization is out and out non-profit making. Those persons who will donate to the library for its development will be treated as our member.

Online Donation

Members’ donation is as follows
Donation
US $149.99 for One year

Members’ donation will be paid in advance by any credit card through Pay Pal. They will be permitted to log on to our website. Any books can be downloadable till the expiry of their membership (except the copyrighted).

Offline Donation
Any person who does not hold any credit card he may take subscription by paying the donation in Indian currency (the exchange rate of dollar in term of Indian rupee existing at that point of time) equivalent to the said US $ through Demand Draft/Bankers Cheque Payable at “BENGALI E-LIBRARY , AXIS BANK A/C. No 017010200018692” or "CHAYAN INFOSYS, STATE BANK OF INDIA A/C No. 30204259675". He will also get the same benefit as those enjoyed by Online Subscribers.

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www.banglalibrary.org is an organization operating from :
Jyoti Tower, 313, Nabapally, Ward No. 23, Salt Lake, Sector-IV, Kolkata-700105, West Bengal, INDIA. Phone : +919831193298, +919836422308, +9133-23353176, E-mail : This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

The People Behind :
Jyoti Bandyopadhyay
Dr. Alok Ray, M.A., Ph. D, Dr. Biswajiban Majumdar, Dr. Baridbaran Ghosh, M.A., Ph. D., D. Litt, Dr. Bimalendu Dam, M.A., Ph. D, Pranabesh Chakravarty, Senior Journalist, K.K. Roy Choudhury, Mahamahopadhyaya Prop. Dr. Dhyanesh Narayan Chakrabarti, Late Sitansu Sekhar Ghosh -IRSSE (Retd), Ujjal Bandyopadhyay, Shyamali Ghosh, Niranjan Ch. Paul, Ajay Chakraborty, Keya Bhattacharya (Marketing Consultant).
Rajesh Biswas, Goutam Banerjee, Rajkumar Mondal, Debarati Bhattacharya.

COPYRIGHT POLICY

The copyright policy is as per the Indian copy Right Act 1957.
All the books that are currently available online have either been checked against their copyright re-registration directory in which books prior to 1963 which are not re-registered are deemed to be out of copyright, or have been agreed by the authors.

However, incase of a possible error in copyright checking, if the author or publisher sends a written request, along with proper supporting document for removal to the address below, such a request will be validated and complied with within one week of receiving such request.

Jyoti Tower, 313, Nabapally, Ward No. 23, Salt Lake, Sector-IV, Kolkata-700105, West Bengal, INDIA. Phone : +919831193298, +919836422308, +9133-23353176, E-mail : This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it