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Our Story

In October 2018, when Dr. Michael Keller, Vice Provost and University Librarian Chief Librarian, Stanford University, USA, visited Mumbai, he met with Shri Mukesh Ambani, Chairman & Managing Director, RIL. They spoke at length about the evolution of library technologies with the advent of digitization; the scope it presents for knowledge acquisition collection, organization classification, retrieval and dissemination and how libraries can be extensive and illusive repositories of knowledge that transcends geographical barriers.

Mr. Ambani’s visionary approach immediately latched onto this potential breakthrough opportunity to provide wide-spread access to quality educational and research resources. Accordingly, in the beginning of 2019, the first concept note for the Jio Institute Digital Library was drafted. It was the first step to translate a grand vision of a world-class 21st-century research library.

To understand the way forward, in May 2019, our team visited Stanford University to witness first-hand, the advanced technologies that had transformed their libraries and met with several heads of different library collections. The idea was to learn as much as possible from them with regards to people, infrastructure, collections, partnerships etc., and then devise a strategy for the Jio Institute Digital Library. Subsequently, to ensure contextual understanding, the team visited and interacted with the librarians from TISS (Social Sciences), AIIMS (medical sciences), IIT-B (Engineering), IISc (Natural Sciences) and IIMs (Management).

An integral part of every meeting or interaction was to understand the role, scope and definition of technology in this project. How would different tech platforms communicate with each other? How much of it was open source? How much could we build? What kind of hardware infrastructure was ideal? We quickly realized that these were layered questions and would require significant acumen and experience to answer. Thus, we started drafting a technology strategy for our Library – one that would answer these questions and detail implementation strategies. Our Library was slowly taking shape.

With this, we were on our way to developing a blueprint for the Library, In October 2020, we organised a two day workshop in Ahmedabad, Gujarat comprising of library experts from Stanford University and different parts of India. It was the first event held under the aegis of Jio Institute and gave us a chance to interact with different library professionals and present our vision for the Jio Institute Digital Library. It culminated into several interested insightful learnings.

Even after we had a fair idea of what was to be done, we did not stop our consultative process. Furthermore, our interactions with stakeholders became more specific. For instance, our extensive interaction with members at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum and The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute gave rise to the idea of curating ‘History of Mumbai’ as one of our maiden special collection initiatives. Another special collection project, Indian Arts, Architecture, Culture, Heritage and History is also on the anvil and will focus on India’s rich heritage across diverse fields such as literature, culture, history, arts, medicine etc.

In January 2021, when the University Grants Commission (UGC) committee visited Jio Institute for a mandated inspection, they were impressed with our vision strategy and technology road-map for the Jio Institute Digital Library. The committee urged us to share this information and knowledge with other libraries. Accordingly, in April 2021, we co-organized a 5-day workshop with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) that was attended by more than 50 library professionals (selected from over 1100 applicants) from across India.