VIDYA - Amrita Digital Library

Welcome to VIDYA - Amrita Digital Library .  "Vidya" began as a modest Digital Information Repository way back in 2001 as an attempt to tap the potential of vast resource of information available on the World Wide Web. The ever mounting necessity for quality learning / teaching material found an effective answer once we started collecting and organizing tutorials and lecture notes from some of the most reputed universities/ research centres around the world. Learning material thus organized was made available through an intranet server to the campus community on the campus network . The result was phenomenal in every way, soon we found that learning  here is, unlike many places, not confined to the text boooks and the walls of the classroom and people in the campus. Students and faculty members began to incorporate this archived learning material into their learning/ teaching schedule and this gradually contributed immensely towards nurturing a global approach towards teaching, in depth understanding of subjects taught and expansion of awareness.

What began as a local repository of static learning material in course of time evolved into nearly 4 Tera Bytes( 4000GB) of organized information on over 20 different areas including multimedia rich learning objects comprising of Video/ Audio lectures/ Documentaries ( Over 5000 Hours) from around the world made available on the campus network through Streaming and On-demand mode. Our this effort on Selective Dissimination of Information gathered momentum with the release of MIT-OCW and we are perhaps the first institution in the nation to build a local repository of Selected material from MIT-OCW and integrate it into our teaching platform. VIDYA archive is built not just to aid the teaching and learning process at Amrita, it is built envisaging the vital need to inculcate inter-disciplinary approach , open new vistas of exploration through learning from the masters across the globe. While the principal emphasis was on Engineering/ Science and Technology all efforts have been made to incorporate the best of Management Studies and Humanities as well adhering to the Educational Fair use Regulations.

The recent addition to VIDYA on the automation front was the addition of a Search Engine developed by B.Tech (IT) Final Year students. This search engine "Eureka" indexed a core e-books/ tutorial archive in VIDYA amounting to well over 150 GB. A Fully searchable - Metatagged Institutional Video Repository comprising of Indo-US Video lectures delivered by eminent academicians/ researchers from around the world has also been integrated through D-Space platform and Vidya community is active through WikiMedia. A common Gateway to is also integrated to VIDYA which allows seamless access to IEEE Explore, ACM Digital Library and Digital Engineering Library knowledge base. Currently the E-books archive of Vidya hosts over 92,000 ebooks and work is well underway to deploy an enterprise search to index this collection.

Current work involves Porting the entire Video/ Audio lectures collection to D-Space and map VIDYA content to the Engineering Syllabus. VIDYA is accessed across our other campuses situated at Amritapuri, Cochin and Bangalore. Recently a 500 Gb custom built archive of Vidya was built for the Arts and Sciences Campus in Kochi and the entire Vidya is mirrorred in the 2Tb server at Amritapuri campus and work is underway to mirror VIDYA in Bangalore campus well.

In 2005 VIDYA was presented in the International Confernce ACDL 2005 and recently Mr.Ajai Narendran, the architect of VIDYA was invited to speak at the Freed.in 2008 conference organised by JNU and SARAI, New Delhi.

VIDYA Curriculum Resource Mapping ( Available on the Campus Intranet)


Click here to download VIDYA Poster | The Vidya Story