GLAM/Newsletter/July 2024/Contents/India report
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GLAM partner ventures into 'Digitisation Plus' programs with Wikimedians
Context
Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir (PNVM) is 175 year old Library based in Pune city of India is CIS-A2K's digitisation partner since 2021. PNVM has digitised and uploaded 1182 reference value books on Wikimedia Commons. Realising the vast nature of the digitisation program, this GLAM institution has started collaborating with other knowledge repositories and Wikimedians to expand their activities beyond digitisation. This 'Digitisation Plus' program started with Digitisation Workshop for 27 libraries in the state of Maharashtra.
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Marathi Literature Database
In the digitisation workshop, the importance of structured database of authors and their works was highlighted by all the participants. The PNVM coordinators and two Wikimedians (User:Shurpalimedha and User:कल्पनाशक्ती) present in the workshop readily agreed to work on this crucial project and approached CIS-A2K for technical assistance. The systematic work of compiling the data of 10 selected authors on pilot basis has been started. The authors and literature data will be incorporated in Wikidata and the Wikisource pages will be linked after this stage. Under the guidance of Bengali Wikimedian User:Bodhisattwa, a technical session on Wikidata and OpenRefine was organised at PNVM on 9 July 2024. Two Marathi Wikimedians, four PNVM members and two A2K members participated in this session.
In the beginning, we discussed overall design of the database project, objectives and available resources. This database will be able to provide the authors and works in public domain at any given point of time, thus aiding the planning of digitisation. The resources and digitisation work will be distributed and coordinated among various partner institutions to avoid duplication. After this wider discussion, the examples from Bengali Wikisource and Bengali authors' & works data on Wikidata were demonstrated. Then the basics of Wikidata project were explained. As the Marathi Wikimedians prepared pilot database for some authors in excel sheet, the hands-on training to operate OpenRefine was imparted. The collaborative efforts of librarians and Wikimedians are in progress to develop this important database.
