Hi,

There has been significant decline in library readerships in India. Libraries are remaining almost empty throughout the day. I believe, that is because, with the increasing usage of internet, there has been a change in behaviour about reading physical books. People are preferring to remain online and get information from the internet, rather than to stay in a library and study there. The libraries are not also coping with this scenario and not upgrading themselves, and losing readers.

Also, the smart phone penetration in India is also increasing. It has been estimated almost one third of Indian citizens will use smart phone by 2019 and that's a huge number. Nowadays, many people who do not have computers, have smartphones with cheaper internet than before. But many of them doesn't know how to search a book in internet, even if does find some book, tends to forget the urls, and unfortunately almost nobody knows anything about Wikisource, even from the academy.

Now, if we have a QR code generation system for Wikisource, we can collaborate with the town libraries or college libraries, send them the codes and help them build a QR code library of books. They can give the codes to readers according to their demands, which will redirect them to Wikisource. We can also generate QR codes for every book we work on and upload them to Commons with a suitable title, creating a QR code library ourselves, thus making the codes google searchable and accessible to the readers. In every case, the viewership of the site will increase.

Regards,

On Jul 7, 2017 7:52 AM, "Asaf Bartov" <abartov@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Certainly, this can be done.

Could you elaborate a little more about the use scenarios you are imagining?

    A.

On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 5:32 AM Bodhisattwa Mandal <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Can we create a Wikisource specific QR code generator tool for the NS0 pages?

People often forget the urls or sometimes doesn't know the way to search texts in Wikisource. If we can generate qr codes, that would also benefit libraries from remote places or readers who don't have computers in their possession .

I think it will definitely increase the viewership of the site to a significant amount.  What's your opinion regarding this?

Regards,
Bodhisattwa

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