Gandhi Bhavan in Bengaluru to get their digitised archival material during seminar on August 24 and 25

Servants of Knowledge (SoK), a non-profit organisation working towards creating free and universal access to public data, has completed the digitisation of around 12,000 books at the Gandhi Bhavan library in Bengaluru, and the disc drives containing them will be handed over to the heads of various Gandhi Bhavans across the country during a two-day seminar on ‘Mahatma Gandhi for the 21st Century’” in Bengaluru this weekend.

Servants of Knowledge (SoK), a non-profit organisation working towards creating free and universal access to public data, has completed the digitisation of around 12,000 books at the Gandhi Bhavan library in Bengaluru, and the disc drives containing them will be handed over to the heads of various Gandhi Bhavans across the country during a two-day seminar on ‘Mahatma Gandhi for the 21st Century’” in Bengaluru this weekend.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will inaugurate the seminar and Minister H.K. Patil will speak at the valedictory function. Gandhians from around the country and outside will speak and interact on these two days.

H.L. Omshivaprakash, digital archivist and co-founder of Sanchi Foundation and SoK, said that the digital library includes volumes of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi as well as hundreds of other resources including Harijan, Young India, Indian Opinion, Nava Jeevan Trust pamphlets, and others.

The multimedia collection also includes 129 audio files of Gandhiji speaking on All-India Radio. The collection includes works in 12 languages. The Gandhi Bhavan has already made 1,272 works available in the public domain at https://archive.org/details/GandhiBhavan, Mr. Omshivaprakash said.

The difference between other agencies involved in scanning and SoK is that the latter makes scanned data easily available and searchable.

This digital repository is the result of a collaboration between the Karnataka Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi and SoK The entire library was digitised in around three months. Additional contributions were made by the Telangana Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi and the Andhra Pradesh Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi.

Carl Malamud, U.S.-based open data activist and founder of SoK, said: “A library is a wonderful thing. It knows how to manage itself, but it needs to adapt to new technologies. Libraries can be preserved for posterity and made easily available by scanning and uploading data to the Internet. That is how you democratise data.”