Digitisation, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource Orientation Workshop at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, Pune District
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Access to Knowledge
Subodh Kulkarni
4 April 2017
A digitization workshop was held at Vigyan Ashram, following the success of the introductory workshop in February.
On 5 February, an introductory Wikipedia orientation program was held in partnership with Vigyan Ashram, for 15 youths from Pabal and surrounding villages in Shirur, Maharashtra. Given the keen interest and enthusiasm of the participants, a follow up workshop was held on 3 April, 2017.
This workshop was attended by 30 participants who were trained on Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. They were given an orientation on digitization and OCR tools as well. The workshop aims to enable the training of resource persons who can go onto be employed at libraries and museums in order to help with their digitization efforts. The scanning of old encyclopedias in Marathi has also been proposed for the Wiktionary project.
Participants were taught how to upload books from the Internet Archive to Wikimedia Commons. Subsequently,there was also a demonstration of transferring books from Commons to Wikisource. There are two ways of doing this: the page by page OCR process or converting a complete book through OCR4Wikisource. As OCRS4Wikisource program runs only on Linux, limitation of machinesat the event was a hurdle in providing all the participants a hands on experience. Therefore, the scanning activity could not be completed.