Grants:IEG/Making telugu content accessible/Midpoint

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Created nearly 40 pages to catalog Digital library of India books. And cataloged 1500 books with descriptions & other details on Telugu Wikipedia.
Created and developed more than 200 articles in Telugu Wikipedia, added 21 copyright free books to Telugu Wikisource using Digital library of India books.
Conducted edit-a-thon, social media campaign, On-Wiki requests in order to increase community engagement in this project. These efforts resulted participation of more than 10 Wikipedians in project & a new editor to Wikipedia.
Attracted scholars, writers, book lovers and other netizens to make use of this catalog by an active campaign in social media.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

I (pavan santhosh surampudi) started a project page with the help of some other telugu wikimedians like User:Rajasekhar1961, User:Kvr.lohith which can anchor the efforts of telugu wikimedians. In that project discussion page, discussions have been taken place to decide the policies, to make collaborations, and off-wiki activities has to be done. Many other wikipedians who can not contribute to catalog activity like Rehmanuddin, Pranayraj also made their valid points discuss in this talk page.
Visited two experienced library science professionals named K.P.Asok kumar and Gopala Raju to discuss about the working model for this catalog activity and taken these advices into consideration.
We (me and other volunteers) have created 39 pages which are catalogs of telugu books in DLI website in telugu wikipedia. So, that the Volunteers of the project can work on the catalog pages without repetition of work. This mostly avoided the confusions that may occur on offline work which I thought of doing earlier.
Started doing catalog work, creating articles and adding books to wikisource and doing it continuously day by day.
Helped wikipedians who wanted to volunteer for this catalog and related work. Trained book-lovers who came forward to volunteer this project on wikipedia style of writing, wiki-markup code, etc. These things have been done on online and offline edit-a-thons, academies.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.
Experiment(s)

In grant writing process and discussion on grant I thought of doing my catalog on excel sheet and use some software to publish it in wikipedia and necessary sister projects. But my fellow wikipedians suggested me that it wouldn't work better for collaborative work. I also got to know that wouldn't work better for projects in wiki which may lead overlapping of work by two volunteers and project may lag behind collaboration. So, we started content pages on telugu wikipedia and creating catalogs on wiki.
We choose the thematic groups on social media which have a common interest towards telugu literature and continuing to post about very interesting and very rare books found in DLI and been cataloged. Out of many people appreciated the project we succeeded few to volunteer us by creating their user name.
I've concentrated more on the community participation. I tried to make wikipedians love and own the idea and work on it. So, we(me and few people who take active participation) involving people not only in cataloging but also in creating & developing articles from the books been cataloged, Upload copyright free books to Wikisource and also tried to upload rare and valuable photos of authors to wikimedia commons.
I took suggestions, mainly on selecting proper books to catalog, from the researchers and journalists because they are also the target audience for this project finally. Journalists/editors like Katta srinivas, V.V.Hanumantha rao, Research scholar Pranay raj, writer Kasturi Murali Krishna responded promptly and gave valuable inputs in selecting and prioritizing books.

Changes/creations of this project:

Created nearly 40 catalog pages in telugu wikipedia to sort the dli books in alphabetical order with the help and support of community. Telugu wikimedians who volunteer this project are adding books to these pages. In these content pages there is a page which specifically contains the catalog of mathematical books too. That page has been created by a math teacher present in our community and he is making changes whenever he finds a book related to maths been cataloged in remaining pages.
More than 1500 books from DLI are catalogued in telugu wikipedia under this project by more than 10 active wikipedians.
Created and developed more than 200 articles in telugu wikipedia using DLI books catalogued under this grant. Improved quality of these articles by adding citations, external links from DLI books. This helped improving articles created under wikiprojects like sahityam(about telugu literature), Telugu pramukhulu (about eminent telugu personalities) mainly although there are wide range of articles developed by this project.
Added 21 copyright free books from DLI to telugu wikisource. Some wikipedians interested in this project are also working for typing these books in wikisource. Rajasekhar took active part in adding those books.
Efforts on community engagement resulted in making 12 active telugu wikipedians help this project. Helped them to understand how DLI works and how to build this catalog and make use of it in telugu wikipedia development.
Through social media propagation of this grant project, new user to wikipedia Lakshmi devi came forward and created account in wiki to help this project.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

I've taken the living expenses for first two months in Rs.16,000 each through self check. Due to the bank holidays didn't took that amount for third month yet. I'll take that amount on coming three days. (New Edit:After finishing this report I've taken my third month living expenses Rs.16,000 and also updated in finance page) Internet connection for my home are taken on the name of my mother, as per the prior advice I've given the amount thousand rupees for each month to my mother Mrs. Sailakshmi Surampudi through the crossed check. Conducted an edit-a-thon on august 7, 2014 in connection with this grant project. For this edit-a-thon, I spent Rs.3000 from the grant fund(on which Rs.1400 spent on my travel from Hyd to Tadepalligudem and vice versa, Rs.600 on the food, snacks for guests and Rs.1000 for banners. Other than the above spent money venue, mike, etc., were provided by a school).

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Frequently Digital library of India websites are not working due to technical problems. Interruptions created in project period were ranging from few hours to eight days. Due to these interruptions people enthusiastic in working for this project are losing interest. It became a difficult task for me to inspire them and request them to volunteer again for the project. Entire project stopped in those days. I make use of this period for developing some articles in wikipedia using the books already downloaded from the dli page and learning best practices of cataloging from the professionals.
Initially we thought of creating catalog in Excel sheets and updating them in regular intervals on wikipedia and some other websites who would like to host the catalogs. We worked for few days in that pattern. But later on quickly, we found that this may lead to replication of work, confusion in practices and also discourage the people who has a habit of editing on wiki. So, later on we switched over to edit on wiki.
Editing on wiki lead to a different problem. While proposing the project I proposed the amount of time by keeping excel sheet on mind. But working on wiki mark up code made the progress slow. But I'm trying to overcome this problem by increasing the number of users volunteering the project. I spent many days in first two months on mentoring, guiding, helping the volunteers from wikipedia.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Grants:Learning patterns/Making Digital library of India really useful

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

I'll continue the pace in cataloging more books for the remaining 3 months. As I've spent my first 2 months time on encouraging volunteers along with the cataloging the books. From third month I've paced the number of books to be cataloged.
Publish the catalog in the blog, webzine to make it more accessible.
I'll Try popularizing the catalog through publishing an article related to this project experience and the rare and useful books been cataloged on a literary webzine and posting regularly on the social media in some useful user groups. So that some people form wide interests may come forward to join this work. This may result in increasing no. of active editors in telugu wikipedia too.
I wanted to apply for a 6 month renewal of this IEG at the end of my project.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

It's a great experience to work on the ocean of digital books every day. Basically I'm a book lover and knowledge seeker. This project made me enjoy my work and make my enjoyment fruitful to the future of telugu language and wikipedia as well. Let me give a small example from the wide experiences, Few research schoolers of theatre art requested me to ping them if I get any books related to drama history in DLI, I helped them for few weeks. I was surprised when they tell about great improvement in quality of the research due to this accessibility. I can foresee what might happen in near future due to this steps in telugu literature and telugu wiki projects and I'm very happy about that.