A file photo of the digitisation process of books on Mahatma Gandhi being under way at Gandhi Bhavan in Bengaluru.
Servants of Knowledge (SoK), a non-profit organisation working towards creating free and universal access to public data, has completed the digitisation of around 12,000 books at the Gandhi Bhavan library in Bengaluru, and the disc drives containing them will be handed over to the heads of various Gandhi Bhavans across the country during a two-day seminar on ‘Mahatma Gandhi for the 21st Century’” in Bengaluru this weekend.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will inaugurate the seminar and Minister H.K. Patil will speak at the valedictory function. Gandhians from around the country and outside will speak and interact on these two days.
Treasure trover
H.L. Omshivaprakash, digital archivist and co-founder of Sanchi Foundation and SoK, said that the digital library includes volumes of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi as well as hundreds of other resources including Harijan, Young India, Indian Opinion, Nava Jeevan Trust pamphlets, and others.
The multimedia collection also includes 129 audio files of Gandhiji speaking on All-India Radio. The collection includes works in 12 languages. The Gandhi Bhavan has already made 1,272 works available in the public domain at https://archive.org/details/GandhiBhavan, Mr. Omshivaprakash said.
The difference between other agencies involved in scanning and SoK is that the latter makes scanned data easily available and searchable.
This digital repository is the result of a collaboration between the Karnataka Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi and SoK The entire library was digitised in around three months. Additional contributions were made by the Telangana Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi and the Andhra Pradesh Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi.
Carl Malamud, U.S.-based open data activist and founder of SoK, said: “A library is a wonderful thing. It knows how to manage itself, but it needs to adapt to new technologies. Libraries can be preserved for posterity and made easily available by scanning and uploading data to the Internet. That is how you democratise data.”
He believed scanning, documenting, and preserving data and making it publicly available is the Gandhian activism needed in these days. “Free data liberates us and stimulates our thought. All those interested should be involved in it, not just government agencies. Such work can only be done in such a multi-lingual country.”
SoK has digitised over 1 lakh books and titles, including a significant number in Kannada and other Indian languages. Around 50 crore people have viewed the digitised works.
The core team of SoK consists of Mr. Malamud, Mr. Omshivaprakash, Sushant Sinha, founder of https://indiankanoon.org, a repository of important laws and court judgments in India, and Lawrence Liang, professor of law at Ambedkar University.
Knowledge academy
SoK has also launched the Servants of Knowledge Academy. “We are conducting free training sessions on various subjects like copyright laws, free and open source technologies, open data, archiving, documentation, library management, scanner design, post-processing tech like optical character recognition, data uploading and other open course ware,” Mr. Malamud said.
The academy will offer online seminars and in-person person training, internships and workshop for librarians. It has already trained over 200 librarians and other interested persons in four seminars already. Three are planned this year.
A seminar on the Architecture of the public library of India will be held in New Delhi this October. SoK is collaborating with Sudha Gopalkrishnan, founder of Sahapedia, for this session.
Servants of Knowledge has digitised the National Law School of India University library. It is currently working on similar projects with Azim Premji University, the Department of Horticulture library in Lalbagh, Hampi Kannada University, the Ramakrishna Ashram, RBANMS, and publishers like Motilal Banarasidas.
Projects under discussion include the libraries of Assam theatre archives, IIT Madras, ASI, and Karnataka Archaeological Society.
