Centre for Internet & Society

Wikimedia India in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society is organising a workshop on "Digitization of books for Indic language WikiSource" on August 18, 2013, 2.30 p.m. to 5.30 p.m.

This workshop will be conducted by Malayalam Wikimedian Viswanathan Prabhakaran. Anyone interested in learning about the process of digitising old manuscripts, books and creating text based documents could join this workshop. The workshop will cover the following topics:

  • Best practices in capturing images using a camera and tripod through demonstration;
  • An introduction to the types of scanners;
  • How to hold books and the need to treat old books with proper care;
  • Discussion on image formats and some basic comparison (i.e. djvu, PDF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF);
  • Introduction and practical use of SM Tether (using Nikon dSLR) in capturing images;
  • Practical demonstration of using Scan Tailor (a free software) in post-processing of scanned pages. Splitting, deskewing, rearranging borders, and de-speckling of scanned pages;
  • Some basic discussion on copyright and introduction to Wiki Source;
  • Importance of online archival resources (DLI, DSAL, Archive.org, etc) and when to do or not to redo scanning of books (i.e., image resolution) that are already available in scanned format;
  • OCR and Indian languages.