Code Swaraj
across the collections using advanced criteria, and you can even search inside the books.
One of the things we’re trying to do on the collection is help improve the metadata. One of the engineers here at the Internet Archive has been experimenting with fuzzy matching on titles, creators, and other metadata fields to try and link each book to identifiers such as ISBN numbers and the Open Library card catalog.
You’ll notice at the bottom of each item in the Digital Library of India there is a spot for “reviews.” Professor Dominik Wujastyk, a distinguished Sanskrit scholar at the University of Alberta, has been using that space to add much better metadata to dozens of books he knows about.
You could do the same thing! If you speak Gujarati, for example, go through some of the 13,000 Gujarati texts and use the reviews space to let us know if there is a better title or author, or maybe if we just got it all wrong! We need your help.
Our second collection tonight is Hind Swaraj, a project that I’ve had lots of fun putting together. This started when I went to see Sam a while back. While we were chatting, he pulled out his laptop and asked me “You have a stick?”
I handed him a USB drive and we continued talking. At the end, he handed me nine gigabytes of PDF files. I asked him what they were and he said “100 volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi in the new electronic edition.” I was astounded.
The 100 volumes of the Collected Works was created by the Sabarmati Ashram, in particular by Dina Patel, who has toiled for years with a team of volunteers to create this definitive electronic edition of the works of the Mahatma. It is truly a monumental accomplishment! She is now putting together the resources to create the Hindi edition of all 100 volumes, and I am looking forward to seeing that come together. It has been a real pleasure to work with her.
When I posted the Collected Works, I started looking around the net for other resources in a similar vein and found the complete works of Jawarharlal Nehru on a government server, but not in a terribly useful format and I assembled those into PDF files. There were three volumes missing, and I’ve found and scanned two of them, and just ordered the last one. We’re almost complete with 77 of the 78 volumes.
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