CIS-A2K has been collaborating with the Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics (GIPE) for the last 4 years regarding various Wikimedia events. GIPE houses Dhananjayrao Gadgil Public library which has a very rich treasure of books from 16th century. They have developed a digital repository on dspace. They have agreed to provide all the scans of PD content uploaded here. The library holds rare material from the British era in the form of reports, volumes, collections, maps etc. Most of it is in PD-US, i.e. before 1926. The proposed collaboration is regarding digitisation of Public Domain books from this library and bringing them on Wikimedia projects. The following process is being planned for this joint venture -
- Drafting of small MoU which defines the roles of responsibilities and course of action with a tentative timeline.
- List of PD-US English books (published before 1 January 1926) and PD-India Hindi & Marathi books (published before 1960 with authors expired before 1960)
- Selection of books for digitisation - We need to involve experienced and learned Wikimedians as well as non-Wikimedians into the selection process of the reference value books.
- Cross-check the list with existing books on Wiki, Archive or other major websites to avoid duplication.
- Setting up the schedule and the process of - scanning, quality check, verification and uploading on Commons
- Preparing plan for uploading PD content from dspace to Commons
- Further integration of content files and metadata with Wikisource and Wikidata