Odia Wikipedia to Digitise 14 Books
On the occasion of the 79th Odisha Day (Utkal Divas) on April 1, the Odia Wikipedia has decided to take up a new project for digitisation of 11 books of eminent Odia author Dr Jagannath Mohanty.
This article was published in the Pioneer on March 30, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.
According to Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge) of Centre for Internet and Society Bengaluru Subhasis Panigrahi, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) would take up the digitisation project where KISS students would type them on WikiSource, a sister project of Wikipedia.
These books include children’s literature, travelogues and biographical essays penned by Dr Mohanty.Digitisation of three more books, two in Odia Jati, Jagruti O Pragati (on people and culture of Odisha) and Bhasa O Jatiyata in Odia (based on research on Odia language), and an English book Classical Odia (on the literary heritage of Odia) will be also be inaugurated on this day.
All these digitised books will be made available on the Internet with open access through free licences. More than 5,000 pages will be digitised in these two projects.Several public and private organisations have started making serious efforts after Odia got the classical language status recently.
To discuss the need for many new tools and technological advancement, a seminar will be held at Jayadev Bhawan here on March 29. Prof Udayanath Sahu and writers Asit Mohanty and Dr Lenin Mohanty will discuss about spell check for Odia, use of Odia language in the media and tools for typing in Odia.
