[Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-in-mum] Liam Wyatt's visit to Mumbai and GLAM meetup - a summary

[shirish शिरीष]

In-line :-

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 09:13, Pradeep Mohandas
<pradeep.mohandas at gmail.com> wrote:
> hi,
> Thanks Arun for posting it here. I was really tired when I posted this
> yesterday to the Mumbai mailing list. It does seem more or less accurate. A
> few additions from what I missed out yesterday night.
> 1. With The Museum ( Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay - CSMVS),
> we spoke with the Museum Director, Chief Art Conservator and the Business
> Development Executive there. After the requisite background that Liam
> provided (it also helped perhaps that the British Museum Director, Neil
> MacGregor visited the Museum this week) that we gave them a rough idea of
> possible activities we could do together. We also explained to the
> Conservator how a typical session would be conducted to help them understand
> their part of the responsibilities and what will be ours.
> 2. At Jnanapravaha, Bishaka and Liam visited. After the usual pitch, the
> feedback was that they were interested in getting students to write and
> improve articles on Indian art and aesthetics on Wikipedia. They have asked
> for help previous to the next semester in July on how such a thing can be
> organised.
> 3. Ashwin Baindur asked about how to work with institutions like Maharashtra
> Archives which are facing a brunt of the budget cuts (they get the money
> after the song and dance shows, museums etc all get their cut) and have
> trouble with up-keep of their archives. Liam replied that this would mainly
> be in helping them digitise records. The trouble, Liam said, was on where to
> begin and how to priorotise work. Stating the example of the National
> Library, Kolkata he said that some books were not even docketed (I forget
> the original word - something to do with giving the books numbers and
> classifying appropriately).

Hi all,
     Wanted to come but for many reasons couldn't be there. Anyways,
the word you are searching for is 'cataloging' and having some sort of
'Integrated Library Management' .

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Integrated_library_system

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Library_catalog

In fact making or getting a good cataloging system is a high pain point.

There are many foss tools that could be used for ILS but all of that
will need funding I guess. For inspiration people could look at Delhi
Public Library as they have used FOSS tools. Koha is what they use.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Koha_%28software%29

>We agreed that Libraries and Archives also
> suffered because there was no good Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
> software for Indic languages. Liam suggested a French example of how an old
> French cursive text made it un-OCR-able (new word - mine!) and got help from
> Wikipedians to manually type in text onto WikiSource.

In Pune, around this time lot of colleges have their technical weeks
where they show projects, last year and couple of years before I had
seen students who had made nice OCR's which could work with indic
languages but obviously required lot of polish and getting into the
whole 'code maintainance' thing. The students motivation for that had
been to do as a project and not getting things 'maintained' which is
unglamorous grunt work. Also documentation is something that would
need to be looked at and fine-tuned.

> 4. Bishaka raised the point that all of the GLAM activities could also be
> simultaneously done in various languages locally. So, during a Backstage
> Pass event in Mumbai, we could improve the English, Hindi and Marathi (say)
> articles at once. Editors in any language are welcome to contribute.
> 5. There have been an influx of new people and requests from people for a
> basic editing session. Perhaps it is time to interlace the meetups with
> WikiAcademy.
> With that, I hope I've more or less covered all Wikipedia territory from the
> meetup. If I missed out on anything, feel very free to jump in and add your
> notes.
> warm regards,
> Pradeep

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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