3 min readBengaluruAug 26, 2024 05:46 PM IST
First published on: Aug 26, 2024 at 01:21 PM IST
The Servants of Knowledge, a non-profit group, has announced that 11,720 books from the library of Bengaluru’s Gandhi Bhavan have been digitised as part of the All India Gandhi Library project.
The group announced this at the valedictory session of a seminar held on Sunday to mark the 75th year of the Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi Organisation.
According to a statement by the non-profit group, Gandhi Bhavan had already made 1,272 books publicly available online. The freshly digitised collection, assembled over three months and spanning 12 languages, includes the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, his publications such as Harijan and Young India and audio recordings of him speaking on All India Radio.
The digitised libraries have been presented to 12 Gandhian organisations.
Among the speakers at the seminar was American public domain information advocate Carl Malamud, who is also part of Servants of Knowledge and the founder of the US-based Public.Resource.Org.
“For the last several months, we have been digitising every book here at the Karnataka Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi libraries. Today we are presenting all of those books in digital format to the organisations here, making them the trustees of this knowledge….this is the first release of the All India Gandhi Library. We have offered to digitise at no cost additional Gandhi materials these organisations may possess to add to the collection. We have already assisted the Gandhi Smaraka Nidhis of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and we welcome additional materials…..as we say ‘scanning is the new spinning’,” he said at the seminar.
Explaining the digitisation process, Malamud told indianexpress.com later, “We make the scanners and frames here in India and have 17 scanners here at Gandhi Bhavan and can scan 15 lakh pages every month… Once you get good at it, you can do 500 pages in an hour. After the scan, a post-process happens where you crop the pages, de-skew it, run optical character recognition and create a PDF file—a whole chain of processes.”
Explaining the challenges of working with old books in general, Malamud added, “If the material is truly fragile, we work with INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) and they help us conserve the books. The same goes with fragile palm leaves. We’re careful while turning the pages with older books, but if the book is going to disintegrate we have it go through the conservation process.”
About some other work done by the Servants of Knowledge, Malamud said, “Om Shivaprakash (another archivist with the Servants of Knowledge) has been instrumental in finding old Kannada books and gotten permission to digitise old Kannada magazines from publishers…. We’re also working on Lalbagh right now and digitising their library of 6,000 books and digitising old and rare prints. There are all sorts of materials that are on the internet for the first time and that is something we’re particularly proud of.”
The Servants of Knowledge is also looking to digitise other collections of Gandhian materials in Bengaluru, including those with the Ramakrishna Ashram.
The group announced this at the valedictory session of a seminar held on Sunday to mark the 75th year of the Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi Organisation. (Express Photo) 
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