TWLCon (2019 India)/Satellite events

Hyderabad

Event is invitation based and conducted in small scale. This satellite event was focused on digital libraries in the Telugu language. Notes of the event will be discussed during the main event.

Date

22 December 2018

Venue

Ravindra Bharathi, Hyderabad

Organised by

User:Pavan santhosh.s (as a part of pre-event work) & User:KCVelaga

Discussed points

Collaborating with eBook stores to provide access on Indian language work to volunteers, indexing Telugu periodicals help existing digital libraries to make them available, and contributing to a project that lists all books and writers in a language. Also discussed possible collaboration with Kinige for a TWL partnership. We discussed various possibilities, technicalities, and issues, that come in the way for this partnership. The representative fro Kinige assured us about taking this proposal to higher authorities and work towards a successful partnership.

Pune

Date

26 December 2018

Wikimedians

User:KCVelaga and User:सुबोध कुलकर्णी

Brief report

This satellite event was conducted on 26 December 2018 which included meeting various librarians and experts from related fields in Pune. This was intended to be a site visit for the main event. We met five personnel over a day and discussed with them of various issues and possible collaborations. They were also invited to take part in the main event, and share their expertise with Wikimedians.

Meetings did with

• Dr. Nanaji Shewale (Librarian) & Prof. Rajas Parchure (Vice-Chancellor); Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics: We spoke about the logistical aspects for the main event, and also explained him in brief about TWL and possible collaborations. We also explored the digitisation work being done and the bibliographic metadata compilation. We also met the Registrar who expressed various concerns about the information on Wikipedia and had a brief discussion about how this can be improved, also explained to him that the situation is much better than before.
• Pradeep Trimbak Rawat (Founder, Rawat's Nature Academy): We briefed Rawat about TWL and the event, why we are doing it and how it is going to be. We discussed the various digital libraries being built and he also shared his experiences of growing a thematic library and making the community use it.
• Dr. Sunita Barve (Senior Technical Officer [Librarian], National Chemical Laboratory): We briefed about TWL and the event, followed by which she raised the concerns of why librarians are not adequately engaged in Wikimedia projects for their professional work. We discussed various platforms and how these can be tweaked to the librarian's need. She explained to us about multiple tools used by librarians and the technology that is currently in use with the libraries for various processes such as cataloging, metadata storage, etc. This conversation is to be taken forward at the main event.
• Dr. Shreenand Bapat (Registrar and Curator In-charge, The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute): We briefed about TWL and the event, and also explored the manuscripts department along with rare books scanning center, jointly run with CDAC. We arranged for a visit to this center by Wikimedians during the main event.