Technology

Technology is an integral component of many programs undertaken by the Noolaham Foundation. We use and build upon a range of technologies including scanning technologies, archiving and digital library software, educational software and collaboration tools.

The Technology Team is responsible for the strategic technology planning and infrastructure implementation for all of Noolaham's operations. Documentation/data collection, scanning, online library, project management and co-ordination--all require cost effective software and hardware infrastructure and support.

Key Activities

Key activities for the Technology Team include:

• Customization, hosting, maintenance and backup of the Noolaham digital library.

Currently Noolaham's digital library uses MediaWiki as the digital library software. It is being hosted pro bono by webspace2host.in; in a LAMP environment. There are three main components to the digital library: content (pdf documents and image files), database containing the metadata, and the website. Everything is being backed up in different locations on a regular basis.

• Software, hardware and logistics support for various Noolaham Foundation's projects and activities.

Many of Noolaham's projects are IT driven. The Technology Team fulfills the IT needs of the Foundation in several ways: undertaking software development and customization, building collaboration and project management tools, providing scanning solutions and other activities.

• Guidance with regards to scanners, scanning technologies and processes to be implemented in the Noolaham scanning centers.

There are manual, semi-automatic, and automatic scanners. Currently we mostly employ manual scanners which demand high labour. In the short term, we are planning to employ semi-automatic scanners and automatic scanners to achieve greater efficiency while maintaining the quality.

• Research, reporting and implementation of the technical Digital Preservation Standards for the Noolaham Foundation.

Devising and implementing a well-structured and robust metadata standard is necessary for proper storage and classification of content in order to enable search, retrieval, and sharing. We create, maintain, and share descriptive, structural and administrative metadata in accordance with international standards such as Dublin Core and Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). We are still evolving the metadata standards to suit the needs of our content.

• Technology, analysis and support for the design and implementation of multi-lingual and multimedia digital library software.

Considering our growing needs we have began the process of transitioning into an advanced digital library software. Currently we are evaluating various software solutions for implementation. Multimedia, meta-data management, browsing and searching, social sharing and community features, multilingual support, work flow, access control, scalability, extensibility, maintenance, costs and development community are key considerations.

• Provide risk assessment of the digital collections supported by the Noolaham foundation.

Digital resources are easy to store, share and preserve, yet technological obsolescence is a major concern. Discontinuation of particular software or hardware support can render digital resources morbid. Noolaham Foundations plans for the long term by digitizing the resources in high quality using well supported formats and technologies and we continually monitor and put in migration plans when necessary.

• Support research and development of language technologies such as OCR.

Noolaham Foundation has identified Tamil optical character recognition (OCR) and machine translation as high priority technologies that will greatly assist with the Foundation's work. We work with university research groups primarily in the following areas: requirements gathering, benchmark preparation and data selection.

• Establishing Virtual Class Room for supporting educational needs of students.

The goal of the Virtual Class Room is to provide students open courseware for self directed learning as well as to assist in their regular school work. This project uses Moodle learning management software. This project is in its early stage of development.

• Building a semi-automated web indexer and archive for Sri Lankan Tamil related content.

Primarily undertaken by undergraduate students with guidance from professors, this project aims to build on open source web archiving tools and use them to index and archive Sri Lankan Tamil related content.