Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) has digitised over 24,000 dissertations and rare manuscripts that would be available online to researchers and readers around the world.

Anwar Ijaz, Chief Librarian of QAU, said that the process of digitisation was started with a photocopier, but later Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) built an incubation centre and a digitisation centre at the university for sharing Türkiye's entrepreneurial and innovation capacity.

He said over 10,000 books and over 400 historical and cultural works from the 18th and 20th centuries in several languages, especially in Arabic, English, and Sindhi, kept in the library of the university, would be digitised. Digitisation would not confine the knowledge sources and become online for everyone.

“Availability of these sources will also help in reducing plagiarism as the data which is not online can be reused without the permission of the author,” he added.

He highlighted that the cooperation of TIKA helped in finding local solutions to technological problems, and making good use of the existing intellectual potential by putting the incubation centre into service.

Muhammad Hamid, Assistant Librarian at QAU, said that the process of digitisation was started with the existing resources, and now a modern fast scanner machine is available to them.

He said Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was used to convert images into text with the help of free source software. “The size of scanned files has also been reduced without compromising the quality,” he added.

Muhammad Hamid also extended his cooperation and help to the librarians, universities and institutions that want to learn the digitisation of books with their limited resources.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk