Krishikosh a Digital Repository of NARES
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.
Under the ICAR’s Open Access policy it is mandatory, to upload all Institutional publication viz., research articles, popular articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, pamphlets, brochures, bulletins, summary of the completed projects, speeches, and other grey literatures available with the various SAUs in the Krishikosh. Besides this, M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis/dissertations (full contents) and summary of completed research projects to be submitted in the Krishikosh repository after completion of the work. The metadata (e.g., title, abstract, authors, publisher, etc.) be freely accessible from the time of deposition of the content and their free unrestricted use through Open Access can be made after an embargo period not more than 12 months.
For easy access to this repository, new initiatives have been taken up for efficient development and dissemination of Krishikosh to the end users of NARES. These initiatives includes the efforts for addition of new library, Development of tutorial video, Development of database for NARES library, uses of Social Media, Upgrade the Dspace version from 4.x to 6.x, Development of mobile application for Krishikosh, etc.
103 SAU’s / ICAR institutes are registered in Krishikosh. Currently this repository has more than 1,60,000 articles items which include more than 1,00,000 theses.
Tutorial videos were developed and available at E-Granth website for registering in Krishikosh and uploading of document with embargo settings. These videos can be utilized by the user to have better understanding for these processes. The impact of social media is very high for dissemination of information therefore, keeping these things in mind Krishikosh page has been created on Facebook for easy access of this digital repository.