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Grants:IEG/Growing Kannada-language Wikimedia projects with a digital library/Midpoint

< Grants:IEG | Growing Kannada-language Wikimedia projects with a digital library


Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

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In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far. The project has helped us create a streamlined process to get the OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books related to Kannada from DLI and OUDL libraries. A small team has been working together to get the books pushed to Wiki projects such as Commons and Kannada WikiSource. The major activity related to Kannada Books wiki page creation through crowd sourcing would be kick started after crossing the hurdle of DLI metadata review. Apart from this having got the principal approval from a major regional newspaper to share e-Books information under creative commons license is a big win.

Methods and activities

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How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.


  • Created a workflow required for the crowd sourcing activities & developed a prototype to discuss it further with community members.
  • Adopted changes requested in work flow.
  • Pruned the data to find the Out_of_Copyright books on both DLI and OUDL.
  • Identified the mismatched content on metadata - reworked on review.
  • Technical issues related to DLI and OUDL website availability were sorted by using local dump of the books for group activities.
  • Reached out to news papers to release the book contents (Many DLI and OUDL books info have been shared by news papers with additional info) under creative commons. We have been able to get a principle approval from one of the major regional news papers. We are year to hear about this initiative officially along with a new website launch of the press. This would be the first such contribution from Regional Press. Expecting this to set a new milestone towards content donation for Free Knowledge.
  • Our group worked on Internet Archive and its scripts to upload the OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books to internet archive. This is mainly to ensure we build a team to collaborate with on-wiki activities starting from importing books to Wiki Commons and then to wiki Source and so on.
  • Scanned Kannada Books from OUDL can now be found on Internet archive here.
  • All books imported to Wiki Commons have been categorized properly to easily identify the account and the activity.
  • Category:Scans from Osmania University Digital Library on Wiki Commons now contains 206 items from OUDL. DLI to see around 800 OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books in next level. Another category to look for these books is Category:Djvu books in Kannada.
  • User:Vijaykumar.kukanur became an expert in pulling the books from Internet Archive to Wiki Commons to Wiki Source. His contributions can be found here. He has contributed more than 100 books in this category. Looking forward to work with him on Wiki source to bring the content under Unicode format in next phase.
  • Initiated a collaboration with ITFC to help teachers learn wiki editing through the module created for this project. Similar collaboration is expected with couple of more organizations.
  • Documented activities around IA, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource in blogs to ensure it's shared to other communities to learn from the best practices.
  • Code created for wiki modules on pustaka.sanchaya.net along with the book metadata review modules on samooha.sanchaya.net for review can be now reused for other Indian Langauge books available on DLI and OUDL.

Source Code

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Midpoint outcomes

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What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

  • Prototype is ready to be used for crowd sourcing at http://pustaka.sanchaya.net.
  • Metadata scraped from DLI and OUDL again. Review done via http://samooha.sanchaya.net for OUDL. DLI is in progress
  • Source code is made available for re-use from other Indic languages in future.
  • We were able to convince a newspaper to contribute E-Books information in CC. Others to follow the lead.The official news will be out along with their new portal launch
  • Downloaded and kept the complete set of books to avoid online issues faced with DLI and OUDL libraries.
  • 200+ Books are now in Internet Archive.
  • 200+ Books are not in Category:Scans from Osmania University Digital Library on Wikimedia Commons as well as Kannada Wikisource.
  • All the books are now ready for the proofreading on Kannada wikisource.
  • Collaboration with ITFC (IT For change) established. Principal approval received from Janaastu.
  • We can call out the community for the crowdsourcing activity right after the review of DLI books metadata from the core team.

Participants

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Blogs

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  1. IEG For Kannada Wikipedia
  2. IEG: Pustaka Sanchaya 1st Meetup- Activity Log
  3. ಸಮೂಹ ಸಂಚಯ: ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ಲೈಬ್ರರಿ ಕನ್ನಡೀಕರಣ ಎರಡನೇ ಹಂತ
  4. ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಸಂಚಯದ ಪುಸ್ತಕಗಳನ್ನು ವಿಕಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪರಿಚಯಿಸಲು ಸಹಕರಿಸಿ
  5. Making Kannada Books available on IA – A Quick WikiMeetup with ITFC team
  6. IEG: Copying books from Internet Archive to Wiki Commons & Kn Wikisource
  7. Uploading OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT Books to Internet Archive & Wiki Projects
  8. IEG: Project status updates – February
  9. IEG: How did we do it? IA – Commons – Wiki Source for Kannada Books

On Wiki

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Images

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Finances

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Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Yes, the funds have been utilized appropriately. Activity related fund would be used in the second half. There are no major changes in the budget/expenditures anticipated further.

Learning

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The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

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What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • DLI and OUDL website accessibility has been a major concern. This has been taken care by scraping the data for offline use.
  • DLI changed it's core library software to Dspace system. This caused broken links to book sources. Metadata has been recollected, and being reviewed to quickly make the books available on wiki projects.
  • Kannada community being small it has been hard to see a big participation for preparation activities. This issue got sorted as the core team started growing slowly.
  • We would require offline activities happening in multiple places with an instructor available to guide the crowd quickly. We are planning to build additional GIFs and Videos to sort this issue.
  • Project timelines shifted due to Financial year ending, Annual Exams in Schools etc. New academic year is being targetted to get going with the planned activities.
  • Meeting places for small groups used to be a problem. Accessibility and availability issues sorted with ITFC and Janaastu agreeing to work with the community further.
  • Finding experts to identify the important books of Kannada from the collection. Upcoming community reach out and blog posts would sort the issue by bringing people close to the project.

What is working well

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What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

  • Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities

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What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

  • Get the pending 800 books on IA, Commons and Wiki source quickly after the review for DLI collection.
  • Concentrate on writing multilingual blog posts about the project and activity to attract more people.
  • Initiate social media drive.
  • Get the project intent published in major regional news papers.
  • Offline and Online Editahon's to be conducted.
  • Push for the CC content release from news paper agencies. Utilize the positive response to attract other content donations under Creative Commons.
  • Start testing the Google OCR on Kannada Wikisource for DLI and OUDL books. This would enable us to accelerate the proofreading activity for Kannada books.
  • Kannada Wiki pages clean up/improvement activity to maintain and upkeep of the quality.

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

IEG has been a booster for the community as a whole. It has been a privilege and a great responsibility to make things happen that we dream around wiki projects. What surprised me is that, we didn't accept anything that is OK to be completed. We continued to fine tune the solution, finding gaps and find the best way to systematically place the books in various projects. Further activities are going to be smoother due to this homework so far.

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