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The purpose of this paper is to describe the need for a digital repository of SIP reports and how the Digital Repository of SIP reports was set up using the Greenstone open source software at the ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad. In management education, students have to undergo a Summer Internship Project (SIP) in organizations to enhance learning and experience current work practices. Information of these projects needs to be captured and maintained in a digital repository to enable knowledge sharing and learning. The phases involved in the creation of the digital repository are described. Steps involved in the Collection development using the GLI tool, "Greenstone Librarian Interface" are also described. Installation of the digital repository is simple, Gathering of documents into the repository, enriching them with metadata, setting up of appropriate search indexes has to be done for efficient retrieval of information. Some knowledge of computers and Greenstone software is essential. Once the digital repository is created it needs to be maintained. Staff need to be trained for correct uploading of documents and submitting metadata into the repository. Students need to be aware that the SIP report document must be a single document and must be given metadata in order to improve discoverability. Guidelines are provided to assist setting up of a digital repository using the Greenstone software. Retrieval of information and knowledge sharing regarding the summer projects, the organisations where projects were done, the type of projects, etc., are possible with the creation of the digital repository. The digital repository provides ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad with a central facility for systematic archiving of summer internship project reports and an insight to the organizations which offer projects, the type of projects that they offer, the applicability of the projects students have done etc. The digital repository is of use to students, faculties and the organizations. Management institutions, especially in India, should be encouraged to develop digital repositories of summer internship projects and share knowledge.
Introduction
In management education, students have to undergo a Summer Internship Project (SIP) in organizations to enhance learning and experience current work practices. SIP is a simulation of the business environment and enables students to experience the rigors of a business organization.
An insight to the organizations which offer projects, the type of projects that they offer, the inferences that the student have been able to draw and the quality-applicability of the projects that the student has been able to achieve, etc. are important factors which need to observed and learnt from. SIP can also give important leads to the management institution to develop corporate interactions, management education and development programs and placements in the future based on these learning.
Each project is unique in its own way, and therefore it is imperative that the knowledge that is built is captured so that it can be of utility to students, faculty and the organizations. This knowledge can be captured and maintained in a digital library, so that there is sharing and learning from it.
Summer Internship Project at ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad
The ICFAI Business School (IBS), Ahmedabad offers a two year full-time PG program in Business Administration. All students are required to undergo the SIP after the successful completion of the second semester.
The nature of the SIP depends upon the functional area the student is assigned to work, the type of organization, the organizational priorities etc. The types of projects students have been assigned are market research, feasibility studies, consumer awareness of specific products, product launching, business process studies etc
The orientation of SIP is not only academic research and report but making the students work on real tasks and get exposed to corporate work culture and environments. It provides students with opportunities to apply the concepts learnt in the classroom to real-life situations, to sensitize them to the nuances of a work place by assigning time-bound projects in a company.
The SIP has duration of 16 weeks with no parallel academic activity. SIP emphasizes faculty supervision during the project and the evaluation of the student's work with active involvement and supervision by the company guide at the organization. The student is required to submit periodical reports in prescribed formats and a final SIP Report. Copies of the report are submitted to both the organization where the project was done and the faculty supervising the project. Although the student would have prepared the SIP report in a digital format, usually, only the hard copy of the report was submitted.
The faculty guide at IBS send these hard copy reports to the IBS Ahmedabad Library once the internship and evaluations were over. Thus every year, all the SIP reports of all the students at IBS, Ahmedabad were accumulated in the library.
The need to develop a digital library of SIP reports
The SIP reports were usually submitted by students in a hard copy format though sometimes, a student may be submitting a soft-copy of the report to the faculty. After evaluations, faculty guides usually send the hard copy reports to the library. They may even retain some of the well prepared reports, good project reports done in reputed companies with them.
Space is usually a constraint for a growing Library, and the same was the case with IBS, Ahmedabad Library. Obtaining spare racks to arrange the SIP reports, indexing them for easy retrieval was an issue. The SIP reports, collected from all faculties were kept in a box in one corner of the library. There was no indexing and trying to find, retrieve information about previous years SIP projects was a mammoth task.
The implementation of the Libsuite software - a Web enabled library automation software at IBS Ahmedabad Library initiated online Circulation, acquisition, cataloguing and even serial control. The collection of the library today is approximately 12,000 books.
Web OPAC is available on the Intranet for faculty, staff and students. Bar-coding is in process and different aspects of automation are slowly being initiated in the library.
As different aspects of library automation started being initiated in the library; the need to develop a digital library of Summer Internship Reports arose. This would not only minimize the pressure of physical space requirements (racks) for storage of these SIP reports in the library but would ensure that all the project reports generated year after year by the students are available in digital format, properly indexed and retrieval of information would be easy.
The need for creation of a digital library arose, which led to the development of the Digital Summer Internship Project System (SIPS). The open source Greenstone Digital Library software was chosen to do the same.
Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL)
The Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL) is an internationally renowned open source software system for developing digital libraries. It is promoted by the New Zealand Digital Library Project Research Group at the University of Waikato, headed by Dr Ian H. Witten, and is sponsored by the UNESCO. The software is issued under the terms of GNU General Public License.
Greenstone provides a way of building, maintaining and distributing digital library collections, opening up new possibilities for organizing and sharing information.
Greenstone builds collections using almost popular and standard digital formats such as HTML, XML, Word, Post Script, PDF, RTF, and many other formats which include audio as well as video. It is provided with effective full-text searching and metadata-based browsing facilities that are attractive and easy to use.
Greenstone incorporates an interface that makes it easy for people to create their own library collections. Collections may be built and served locally from the user's own web server, or (given appropriate permissions) remotely on a shared digital library host. It runs on a wide variety of platforms such as Windows, Unix/Linux, Apple Mac etc. and provides indexing, searching, browsing and metadata extraction. The OAI feature in Greenstone shows the software team's concern to international trends in open digital library and open archiving technologies.
The most significant set of features of Greenstone User Interface is its simplicity, flexibility and the high degree of customizability. It incorporates an interface that makes it easy for institutions to create their own library collections. Greenstone also has an exhaustive set of well documented and articulated manuals.
Phases of development
Phase I: The local digital repository of SIP reports
Greenstone Digital Library Software Version 2.60 was initially installed on a system with Windows XP Professional and a local Digital Library Collection was created. Collection development is done using the GLI tool, "Greenstone Librarian Interface", which is a tool for collecting, expanding and building digital libraries. It gives access to Greenstone's functionality from an easy-to-use "point and click" interface.
The Greenstone Librarian Interface was used to develop the sample collection. Dublin Core Metadata Element Set was selected as the standard. Sample data of SIP Reports available in Word format were entered.
The four main steps in the Librarian Interface are:
Gather. The documents to be included in the Greenstone collections are gathered here. A new collection called SIP Reports Batch 2006 was created in the Greenstone collections. The SIP reports that were to be included in the SIP Reports Batch 2006 Collection were gathered from the local directory into the collection.
Enrich. Metadata for the documents are entered in this phase. Metadata Elements from the Dublin Core set for each SIP Report was added:
- Title: The SIP Report Title;
- Creator: Student's name;
- Description: A short description of the project;
- Publisher: The Organization where the Project has been done;
- Contributor: Faculty's name - who is supervising the Project;
- Subject: Subject and keyword identifying the SIP Report; and
- Date: Month of the Report.
For example:
- Title: New Product Launching and Promotions-Marketing of FMCG (Snack Food);
- Creator: Subhra Sikha;
- Description: The Project focuses on the product knowledge, the distribution channel, the sales procedure and branding strategies with the involvement of distribution network;
- Publisher: McFills, Ahmedabad;
- Contributor: Dr Prateek Kanchan;
- Subject: Branding, Consumer Awareness, Innovation, Marketing Management; and
- Date: May 2006.
Design. This phase consists of general options and settings. The Document Plugins, Search Indexes, Browsing Classifiers etc. are defined here:
- General "Collection information" such as "Collection Title ", "Collectors E- mail Id", and a brief description "About the collection" were entered;
- Search Indexes on Title, Subject - "Keyword", Publisher - "Organization", Contributor - "Faculty", Creator - "Student", text were created; and
- Browsing Classifiers like AZCompactList for the metadata Title, Hierarchy for metadata Subject - "Keyword", Publisher - "Organization", Contributor - "Faculty" were created.
Create. The collection is built and previewed here.
Once this test with sample data was successfully conducted, search indexes and browsing classifiers finalized, information was collected from the faculty and Students of the Batch 2006 regarding their SIP's. Information about the project title, the organization where the project is done, the students name and the faculty guide supervising the project was collected along with the soft copy of the project report.
Information of about 40 SIP reports was collected. Students had submitted soft copies of their project reports. Faculties helped identify the metadata - especially the subject area of the project report and keywords which denoted the major points of the project report.
Some of the problems that arose were:
- The soft copy of the report submitted by many students had multiple files with different formats. This created problems to identify one single document as the SIP report.
- Identifying the subject names, keywords - the metadata essential for search was an issue.
- Although easy to use, the library staff had to be trained to use the Greenstone Digital Library Software. Use of the Greenstone Librarian Interface - the Gather-Enrich-Design and Create was critical in order to collect the reports, enter the metadata and build the collection.
Eventually valid data of 25 SIP reports was available and was used to populate the Local Digital Summer Project Report System (SIPS).
Phase II: SIPS on the Intranet
Once the local digital SIP system was successfully tested out, implementation was then done on Windows XP Professional with Internet Information Server (IIS) installed so that SIPS would be accessible on the Intranet to faculty and students.
SIPS would be accessed by both faculty and students when available on the Intranet as shown in Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]. The SIP reports which were collected as Word files were converted to PDF files before being gathered into the Collection when SIPS was made available on the Intranet.
The access path on the Intranet to the Digital Library collection is: http://192.0.0.158/gsdl/cgi-bin/library.exe
There are five ways to find information in this Summer Internship Reports (SIP) 2006 Collection as shown in Figure 2 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]:
search for particular words;
access publications by Title;
access publications by Keyword;
access publications by Organisation; and
access publications by Contributors (Faculty).
Phase III: Moving ahead ... improving and populating SIPS
Data was collected again for the Batch 2007 at the time of SIP completion in June 2006. As a result of the problems which occurred with respect to metadata, data entry and the format of the soft copy of the report submitted by the students of the Batch of 2006, certain changes with respect to data collection were introduced.
This time as a part of the SIP completion formality, all students had to submit the Metadata Input Form for SIPS (see appendix) duly filled. They also had to submit a Word file of the SIP Report in the format of a single document. Approximately 100 SIP reports were collected by the library staff in digital format (Word files), along with the metadata input form, duly filled by the student. At the time of collection, library staff were required to verify that:
- the soft-copy of the report is a single Word file document...thus eliminating the problem of multiple files with different formats; and
- Metadata Input Form was properly filled and verified by the faculty guide ... thus hoping to minimize the metadata errors.
Library staff had been trained with the use of Greenstone Digital Library Software, and its GLI interface. Although the Metadata Input form helps minimize the metadata mistakes, in order to ensure the quality of information available in SIPS a procedure for verification of the data entered is to be introduced to minimize the data entry mistakes.
Benefits of developing a digital summer internship reports system (SIPS)
Each SIP is unique in its own way and it is imperative that the knowledge that is built is captured in SIPS so that it can be of utility to students, faculty and the organizations.
Faculty and students will get to know which organizations offer projects. They will also learn what type of projects the organization has offered in the past. They can also get an insight on the type of work that a student has done on similar projects.
Many organizations make the students work on real tasks, pilot studies and the project reports are then used as a reference. At the time of recruitment some organizations like to know the type of project a student has done, or in a broader perspective, the type and subject areas of the summer projects that students have done.
The development of the Digital SIPS enables sharing and learning and provides an insight on:
- the organizations which offer SIPs;
- the type of projects that they offer;
- the number of SIPs that faculty have supervised;
- the type of SIPs that faculty have supervised; and
- the subject areas of the projects.
Search on basis of keywords, words in text - abstract of the SIP report help identify reports in similar domain areas.
A well populated SIPS can also give important leads to the business school to develop corporate interactions, management education - development programs and placements in the future.
Future plans
The ICFAI Business School, India is a business school offering a two year full-time campus-based MBA program It caters to network of more than 6,000 students, 500 faculties across 16 centers geographically distributed across the country. ICFAI Ahmedabad is one of the centres.
The Library Automation exercise is being carried out at all the centres of IBS with the Libsuite software - a Web enabled library automation software. The Digital SIPS can be implemented initially at each centre on their intranets. SIPS could then be made available on the Internet to enable sharing of summer project information from all 16 centres. This would help share information and benefit students, faculty and organizations across the country.
Conclusion
Developing the SIPS has been a learning experience from the local SIPS, then SIPS on the Intranet...and hopefully to SIPS on the Internet.
As the population of the SIPS will grow, with collections of each years SIP reports being accumulated, the knowledge base will widen. The knowledge captured and maintained in the digital library enables sharing and learning.
Greenstone Support for South Asia
Libsuite Software
Further Reading
1. Brainbridge, D., McKay, D. and Whitten, I. (2004), Greenstone Digital Library Developers Guide, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton.
2. Greenstone (2006), , available at: http://greenstonesupport.iimk.ac.in/ (accessed October 15, 2006).
3. Greenstone Digital Library (2006), Greenstone Digital Library Software, available at: www.greenstone.org/cgi-bin/library (accessed October 11, 2006).
4. Libsuite (2006), , available at www.libsuite.com/ (accessed October 20, 2006).
5. Whitten, I. and Bodie, S. (2004), Greenstone Digital Library Installers Guide, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton.
6. Whitten, I., Bodie, S. and Thompson, J. (2004), Greenstone Digital Library Users Guide, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton.
Appendix
Figure A1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]
About the author
Fixed graphic 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] Is a Faculty, Information Technology and Systems at ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad, India. She has eight years of academic experience and has been a visiting faculty at Gujarat Vidyapeeth and Gujarat University. She has eight years of industrial experience having worked with WIPRO Infotech and the INFLIBNET Programme of University Grants Commission. She holds a Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA), MPhil in Information Technology and is currently pursuing her PhD. Her areas of interest are Databases, Repositories and Knowledge Management. She can be contacted at: [email protected], [email protected]
Gayatri Doctor, Faculty, Information Technology and Systems, ICFAI Business School, Ahmedabad, India
Gayatri Doctor
Figure 1: A screenshot showing the home page of SIPS on the Intranet
Figure 2: A screenshot showing the different search indexes
Figure A1: Metadata Input Form for SIPS
Copyright Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2007