The National Digital Library (NDL) has been conceptualized as new initiative of the Ministry to provide all kind of e-learning materials to learners under the ‘National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology’ (NMEICT). The NDL is entrusted to Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur as a Co-ordinating Institute. The project envisages integrating existing digital contents across educational institutions and to provide single window access with e-learning facility to different groups of users. The project is aimed at developing an integrated portal to query, search and access a large number of academic and research material available at various academic institutes and cover thesis, journals, books, lecture notes including video lectures, etc.
E-Books available in institutional libraries that are connected to the National e-Library can be searched and located through this National e-Library. However, access of the content of these e-books will depend on the access rights given by the content owners. Those books for which either the material is free of copyright or access has been provided by the content owner will be made accessible freely as permitted by law. Digitization of the books is not part of the project and is to be done by individual institutions / repositories but some content can be procured or digitized as needed under the project.
All NCERT books are already made available as e-books, freely by the Ministry and will also be made available freely through the National e-Library. Under e-Pathshala initiative of NCERT, NCERT has digitalized all its text books and has made them available on its web-site i.e. ncert.nic.in and also through e-pathshala.nic.in which is also accessible through all mobile devices. The collections include textbooks for all classes in English, Hindi and Urdu versions converted into e-pub-3.0 format and made available with an exclusive license for free download and dissemination.