BOOKS AT A CLICK (
http://goo.gl/njZeph)
*• By Diana Sahu on The New Indian Express (Bhubaneswar City Express)*
The OdiaWikimedia community and Bhubaneswar-based Srujanika have come
together to make rare science books available online for readers, students
& science educators.
Readers can now access rare science books in Odia language at Odia
Wikisource, an online library of popular books in the language. The Odia
Wikimedia community and Bhubaneswar-based Srujanika have come together to
make these books available online for readers, students and science
educators. This apart, books of Sahitya Akademi award winning writer
Jagannath Prasad Das have been added to the library. Srujanika's co-founder
Puspashree Pattnaik recently provided 700 popular science books that were
published by the organisation to the Wikimedia community for digitisation.
“These books were appreciated by many and even in demand after going out of
print. Hence, we thought if these can be shared under free licence then
they can reach a wider population. Wikipedia contributors can use these as
resources and enhance science content in Odia Wikipedia as well", says
Puspashree, a former teacher. She along with her husband Nikhil Pattnaik, a
former scientist with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB),
Hyderabad, had published several science books as part of their project to
popularise the subject among children. With support from Vigyan Prasar in
New Delhi, the couple had also documented rare works of science published
in books, magazines, periodicals and newspapers from 1850 to 1950 in
electronic format, a few years back. Around science 765 articles written
over a century have been put on CDs and DVDs according to the names of
authors and year of publication. The science books have been digitised by
volunteers of the Odia Wikimedia community and the Centre for Internet and
Society, a non-profit working for supporting Indian language Wikipedia
projects and the communities.
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Pushpashree Pattnaik
Similarly, the Wikimedia community has re-licensed 30 books of Das under a
free license CC-by-SA 4.0. His books can now be accessed at
https://orwikisource.org and anyone can use them for academic or research
work. “My tryst with internet started very late. I was introduced to
digital books through Srujanika's online version of Purnachandra Odia
Bhashakosha - comprising 9,500 pages in seven volumes- which was impossible
to handle on the writing table. That made me think how convenient it would
be to have Odia books avail. able on the internet. As a beginning. I
decided to put my own writings on the internet", said Das. Prior to Das,
eminent writers and litterateurs Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Manoj Panda,
Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and organisations like 'Manik Biswanath
Smrutinyasa' and Aama Odisha' had come forward to make their books
available online for free using Odia Wikisource as a platform. At present,
Odia Wikisource has 280 Odia books and all are either under Public Domain
or Creative Commons Share Alike licences. A team of 10 active contributors,
known as "Uikiali' in Odia, are digitising books of various genres ranging
from science writing, fiction to 0dia classics. “Apart from the science
writ. ings, we are also working on digitising the biography of Nandini
Satpathy which has been published by Ashisa Ranjan Mohapatra of Srimati
Nandini Satpathy Memorial Trust,” says Mrutyunjaya Kar, administrator of
Odia Wikisource and Odia Wikipedia who has been contributing to the
Wikimedia projects in Odia, Hindi, Sanskrit and English for the last four
years. Odia Wikisource is a sister project of Odia Wikipedia.
These books were appreciated by many and going out of print. If these can
be shared under free licence then they can reach a wider population.
– Puspashree Pattnaik
The copyright of the news article is reserved by the publisher and it is
shared here for reading purpose only.
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa /
https://cis-india.org