Servants of Knowledge presents digital libraries to science, educational institutions in Bengaluru

Servants of Knowledge, a non-profit organisation working towards creating free and universal access to public data, has gifted offline digital library archives for research and education to two institutions in Bengaluru.

SoK representatives presented the archives to Arvind Narrain, secretary RBANM Trust, and scientists at the Science Gallery, Bengaluru, at two different events earlier this week. These facilities are in a ready-to-use mode, and will be maintained and updated by the SoK.

SoK founder Carl Malamud, co-founders Omshivaprakash H.L., Sushant Sinha, and Lawrence Liang of Dr. Ambedkar university, New Delhi, and others were present at the events.

“The library curated for the Science Gallery has science books in English, Kannada, Tamil and other languages, collected from various sources. It has additional material in different languages for educational and research,” said Mr. Omshivaprakash. It has digitised copies of around 20,000 books. All of them are searchable in Optical Character Recognition format.

The library created for RBANM has the over 12,000 books that were digitised from the libraries of various educational institutions run by the RBANM Trust and other materials. This includes materials for pedagogy, online and offline teaching and practical training. It has children’s books, text books and other books and educational material that can be used by school, pre-university and degree college students, he informed.

“All such efforts are aimed not only at helping these institutions aid better educational delivery, but also to engage them in protecting and preserving knowledge and archiving it, and making it easily accessible to the general public,” said Mr. Malamud.

Mr. Narrain said the Trust would encourage its students to utilise the facilities not only for their regular studies and projects, but also to take up research in multi-disciplinary studies, and other areas. He said the Trust library will be utilised to provide access to books and magazines to students, researchers and the general public in phases.

SoK has put up over seven lakh pages of Indian gazettes and over six lakh books in Indian languages and English online. Their facility in the Gandhi Bhavan in Bengaluru has the capacity to digitise over 15 lakh pages every month.

“We are making progress. However, it is not easy, due to technical issues and fund raising delays,” said Mr. Malamud. “Our motto is to provide free and universal access to knowledge, in all languages. We are working towards facilitating free, open access to knowledge, through online and offline resources,” he said.

SoK has digitised over 33,000 books of the National Law School India University, and the complete library of Indian Academy of Sciences. Work on digitisation of libraries in Azim Premji University, Hampi Kannada University, Karnataka Sanskrit University, and other institutions is nearly complete.

“The books were digitised and made searchable through Optical Character Recognition technology. The digitisation project in the Gandhi Bhavan is complete with over 11,000 books in multiple languages archived. The group has completed digitisation of over 70,000 science books in the Lalbagh library, and other places. Books on Indian languages, art forms, and children’s literature and Assam Theatre archives, have been digitised in the last few months,” he said.