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Augmented Reality (AR) is the overlapping of the real world and the virtual world. AR is an evolving technology, and its implementation opens up a new direction to multiple types of information access services rendered to the users. The digital library section of the central library IIT Kharagpur has a rich collection of several items like CD/DVD ROMs, Digital Scanners, and VR Devices. Library developed in-house WebAR programs using “ar.js” that support “three.js” and “A-Frame” for Augmented Reality rendering on the web. This study tried to evaluate web-based AR programs’ performance on mobile devices with low-end hardware configuration supporting WebGL and WebRTC. We conducted quantitative research to find the performance of the web-based AR applications using the four independent variables, namely frames per second (fps), request animation frame (raf), load time (lt), entity object (eo). The paper is also helpful to the academic librarians who think about implementing augmented reality library services with no cost involved. The AR-based information service is beneficial to library users with new COVID norms1, as the user does not need to touch anything to get the information. Instead, it gets into his/ her mobile device.

Immersive environments refer to a computer-simulated 3-dimensional virtual world. Libraries worldwide have been adopting and implementing new immersive technologies to enhance users’ experience and learning. The Central Library of IIT Kharagpur offers (i) web-based augmented reality (WebAR), (ii) virtual reality (VR), and (iii) data visualisation immersive services. This research investigates the users’ perceptions on factors that influence their satisfaction with WebAR/VR services. The study surveyed 135 random users to note their immersive library experience; out of them, only 100 users responded to our survey. The results show that 90 per cent of the respondents were satisfied with our services. Secondly, the respondents revealed that data privacy, health, and safety were some of the critical factors that influenced their satisfaction. Further, 14 per cent were apprehensive in terms of their health & safety. In fact, these users reported vision problems, disorientation, dizziness, sweating, and nausea. Based on the data collected, we prepared a framework, using The DELOS DL reference model for information delivery, along with educational and research activities. We believe that this study would lend crucial insights to academic libraries that may be planning to adopt and implement AR/VR as part of their immersive environment.

OAI-PMH enabled open source digital library software like DSpace, EPrints, VuFind, Drupal OAI harvester, PKP harvester had made it possible to harvest massive metadata from different IDR's. IT brought new hope and new opportunities for providing various new services to our library users. This article attempts to explore the tools, techniques and the significant challenges for large-scale metadata harvesting and metadata curation. A recent bibliographic study of Scopus had shown that there is a rapid increase of article publication over the last two decades. "A total of 25,482 publications represent the literary output in different formats, in different subjects, and from various nations" (ul Ajaz Wani & Gul, 2008). All these preprint academic research documents like conference papers, journal article, annual reports, protocols, lecture notes may be already uploaded or needed be upload in various institutional digital repositories (IDR) for long-term digital preservation and reuse. In this study we have harvested the metadata from different such IDRs into a centrally indexed repository for providing a single window search box. Therefore, with this we may dream that day is not far away when we will not need any e-resource subscriptions, as those will be available in our IDR. It will be indeed a great achievement and will be very much helpful to the academic community. However, along with this, a continuous metadata curation is a major intermediate phase, which focuses on the proper mapping of data to metadata. Programmatic curation and manual curations are the two processes done for final curation of the harvested metadata, where both are having their own merits and demerits. This article further focuses on the process workflow of metadata data curation, and the possible challenges need to manage by the librarian for proper indexing of the items.

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