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The Hindu
The Hindu
National
The Hindu Bureau

Session dedicated to Gyana Satyagraha to feature at literature festival on Sunday

This year’s Bangalore Literature Festival will have a session dedicated to Gyana Satyagraha or Peaceful Movement for Free and Open Access to Public Data, inspired by Gandhi’s ideals that fuelled the struggle for Independence.

U.S.-based technologist and public domain advocate Carl Malamud will speak on Gyana Satyagraha, a movement being carried out silently by advocates of free data.

Mr. Malamud is the founder of Public Resource, a foundation battling for free access to public data and standards.

He will focus on the need to create an online public library of public data, books, manuscripts and other media and highlight some of the ongoing efforts towards this, in English and Indian languages like Kannada and others.

The festival is scheduled for December 2 and 3. Mr. Malamud’s talk is scheduled for December 3, at 5.15 p.m.

One of the examples Mr. Malamud will speak of is an agreement with Motilal Banarsidass, a 120-year-old Delhi-based publisher, to create a free and open archive of all their out-of-copyright books or old books that will not be republished.

Servants of Knowledge, a group of Bengaluru-based volunteers and activists, will work with Public Resource in this effort.

“It really is an interesting match-up. We will have them at the Literature Festival and will scan them on site,” Mr. Malamud told The Hindu.

“However, Gyana Satyagraha is a bigger initiative and the Motilal Banarasidass effort is just one of the examples. It is important because it shows their commitment towards providing free and open access to knowledge,” he said.

Mr. Malamud and Bengaluru-based technologist and digital archivist H.L. Omshivaprakash co-founded Servants of Knowledge five years ago. It is a volunteer effort to preserve rare media resources. It now has partnered with some libraries and archives across the country.

Volunteers have scanned and uploaded on the internet, after adding meta data, various types of media. They include books, speeches, magazines, newspapers, palm leaf manuscripts, audio and films over 15 languages.

It is a digital library containing public domain and out-of-copyright works on science, literature, law, politics, history, religion, music, and folklore and others.

All content is open access, searchable, downloadable and accessible to visually challenged people using text-to-speech tools.

Volunteers and staff can scan around 15 lakh pages per month. They are working from Gandhi Bhavan, National Law School of India University, Indian Academy of Sciences and various locations.

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