GLAM/Newsletter/April 2021/Contents/India report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue IV, April 2021

India report

Proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with British Library

Two Centuries of Indian Print (TCIP) project of British Library digitizes rare books from its South Asian printed books collection. Months of collaborative talks led them to upload high quality scans of those books on Wikimedia Commons. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group then proposed to run a proofread competition based on those uploaded books, which TCIP officials readily agreed. Based on the collaboration, the user group organized a month long proofreading contest on Bengali Wikisource from 15 March 2021 to 14 April 2021. Tderrick, the Digital Curator for the TCIP project wrote an introductory blog post on the British Library website. 27 books uploaded by Tderrick were selected for the participants to proofread. 17 people enrolled and 16 people actually participated in the contest proofreading 2621 pages in total. After the competition ended, necessary information to distribute the prizes from the top 5 contributors was collected. TCIP officials sent digital certificates to all of them with logos of British Library, the user group and Bengali Wikisource. The user group sent t-shirts, books, germ protection kits, coffee mugs to respective winners residing in India.