A brief account about the Workshop as a participant.

The workshop was meant as a DIY digitization without having to invest in a scanner and to use a simple digital camera for effective digitization of books and documents.

The following were covered during the Workshop by Viswaprabha, who mainly led this workshop, along with Subhashish (who was trained by Viswaprabha beforehand) and Shiju Alex:
a) Best practices in capturing images using a camera and tripod through demonstration; intro to types of scanners;
b) how to hold books and the need to treat old books with respect; (very critical)
c) discussion on image formats and some basic comparison (i.e. djvu, PDF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF);
d) Introduction and practical use of SM Tether (using Nikon dSLR) in capturing images;
e) Practical demonstration of using Scan Tailor (a Free Software) in post-processing of scanned pages. Splitting, Deskewing, Rearranging borders, De-speckling of scanned pages; f) some basic discussion on Copyright and introduction to Wiki Source;
g) 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;
h) OCR and Indian languages.

Basically the workshop focused on how an 'ordinary' Wikimedian without access to high tech infrastructure can effectively undertake digitization of old books (especially in Indian languages) in a collaborative manner and use Wiki Source to openly share this knowledge.

This was an impromptu workshop that was suddenly decided because of the availability of Viswaprabha (WMIN EC member), who was in Bangalore for WMIN EC meetings. It was also conceptualized as an Alpha stage presentation and meant to be improved further. All the participants were asked to better the presentation, in true Wiki style, Viswa made all the participants also the authors.

I think it was a successful workshop, especially since I had personally witnessed how much money various institutions and govt. are spending on ineffective digitization.  Such similar 'small-scale' workshops can potentially empower interested Wikimedians and can create a decentralized, effective, need-based collaborative digitization of books (our cultural heritage), especially in Indian languages.

The workshop was collaboratively organized by WMIN and CIS-A2K and no expenditure other than coffee and snacks was incurred.  Going forward it wold be useful to further improve this presentation collaboratively, preferably by practice than by discourse. Also to train atleast 3-4 Wikimedians from each language community across India, who can further impart this knowledge to others.

Best,
Vishnu