Krishikosh

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’ 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.

ICAR has institutionalized E-Granth scheme under Division of Agricultural Education to ensure its continued services by intrusting this responsibility to AKMU, ICAR-IARI, New Delhi.

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

Salient Features of Krishikosh

• Krishikosh is digital repository platform capable of Decentralized Management of Content but Centralized Hosting and maintenance for convenience of multiple users.

• Each institution has its own repository with full control without botheration of maintaining hardware/software which is centrally managed at ICAR-IARI, New Delhi.

• Krishikosh Institutional repository of NARES provides open access to institutional knowledge. Krishikosh has been developed by customizing open source software Dspace.

• At present Krishikosh has more than 20 million digitized pages in 83,000 digital items (volumes) like old books, old Journals, reports, proceedings, reprint, research highlights, training manuals, historical records.

• It is full text searchable open access repository. Semantic search enabled through the integration of Agrotags.

• Comprehensive search and browse options are available.

• Easy to register for additional facilities.

• User feedback provision for continuous improvement.

• Institutional users can administer their own repository and can upload, remove, set embargo on their institutional content.