Increasing Access to Local Language Content – Project Noolaham

“The ready availability of relevant local language content is critical for the development of productive capacity… Without locally relevant content in local languages, immediate uses of ICTs for day-to-day activities may not be apparent.”

– Danny Butt and Madanmohan Rao

(PAN Localisation – Authors’ Working Group on Content)

Introduction

Different categories of Tamil speaking communities exist in Sri Lanka. They live in various parts of the country and all over the world as well. They have the need to access their language content through various means. In order to conduct research and to make researchers get involved in the welfare of these communities, relevant local content has to be made accessible.

The Noolaham Foundation collaborates with various institutions and projects in order to create a virtual collection. This collaborative Virtual Digital Library (VDL) operated by the Foundation serves as a learning center where local knowledge is incorporated, enables social interaction for the achievement of constructive social outcomes, functions as a repository for various institutions, and supports cognitive work of scholars and research students. Project Noolaham (PN) is the biggest collection included in this VDL. PN is a non‐profitable, collective and voluntary endeavor aimed at preserving Sri Lankan Tamil related publications in digital format in order to make them available to and for the benefit of all those who are able to access the internet. Thus this project enables increased access as well as new forms of access to the traditional local language content related to Tamil speaking communities of Sri Lanka.

This VDL operates on MediaWiki, a non-proprietary software, which enables the users to contribute easily to the development of the VDL by registering. Pages are created to digital resources which are online with links as well as metadata of those resources. The metadata categories enables browsing according to the author, year of publication, publishers and subjects etc. which make research very easy for the researchers and other users. The Foundation looks forward to implement web 2.0 concepts in to the system and empower researchers/users to collaborate in knowledge creation. Efforts to communicate this to schools, universities, libraries and private institutions are being taken so that the people to whom the content is most relevant are aware and motivated to participate and use the VDL.

Accepted Symposium on Localised Systems and Applications, 2nd September, University of Moratuwa