Servants of Knowledge to digitally archive Motilal Banarsidass’ out-of-copyright books

Servants of Knowledge and Public Resource partner to digitise Motilal Banarsidass' out-of-copyright books. Agreement to be announced at Bangalore Lit Fest. Carl Malamud and H L Omshivaprakash co-founded Servants of Knowledge, to create open access digital library of books, speeches, magazines, newspapers, audio, films in 15 languages. 15 lakh pages scanned per month. Partners include RMRL, NLSIU, IAS.

Servants of Knowledge and Public Resource, voluntary initiatives towards digitisation of rare books and other media, are set to take up digital archiving of some of the publications of Motilal Banarsidass, a 120-year-old Delhi-based publisher.

Motilal Banarsidass recently arrived at an agreement with Public Resource and Servants of Knowledge to create a free and open archive of all its out-of-copyright books or old books that will not be republished. The agreement, which was recently arrived at, will be announced during the Bangalore Literature Festival on December 3.

U.S.-based technologist and public domain advocate Carl Malamud and Bengaluru-based technologist and digital archivist H.L. Omshivaprakash co-founded Servants of Knowledge five years ago.

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

“Our agreement with Motilal Banarasidass is an interesting match up. They’re shipping us 70 out-of-copyright books already. We will have them at the Literature Festival in Bengaluru and will scan them on site,” Mr Malamud told The Hindu.

“As part of the agreement, the publisher will send its old books to scan and post them for open access. And, in return, we will send backlinks on the collection. We have about 600 of its works online from government databases we have mirrored. It approached me to see if we can help clean it up with better metadata and other details. Now, it will ship us a bunch of books from its inventory that are out of copyright. We’ll scan them and provide backlinks to site online along with a copy of the PDFs on disk drives. It will also help us build up the public domain archive that everybody can use. It is among the oldest publishers in India and it has an extensive list of older books that we’re going to work together to make available to a broader audience,” he explained.

This is part of Servants of Knowledge’s larger partnership with libraries, publishers and archives across the country. Its 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.