There are already many repositories ? Why do we need another repository ?
Indic knowledge is embedded in tens of millions of undeciphered manuscripts that are not yet catalogued or examined fully even today. They encapsulate centuries of curated civilizational experience in handling ecology, wellness, sciences, arts, politics and trade to name a few. Today, that knowledge is not accessible or intelligible to the younger generation for various reasons. Having a readily available and searchable repository enables applying the latest technologies to mine Indic knowledge to create social value.
A survey of digital collections of Indic books reveals existence of many sites such as
- Archive.org
- Digital Library of India (DLI)
- Digital Corpus for Sanskrit (DCS)
- Pdfdrive.net
- Sites of independent nature maintained by Mutts and persons of different sampradayas
- Libraries of Universities in different parts of the globe
- Sanskrit Library of India
- Sanskrit Documents site
- Sanskritlibrary.org
Many books on the archive.org, digital library of India etc., which are the largely used open source resources by scholars, researchers, students and general readers, contain valuable books (readable and downloadable) in many formats such as pdf or text and other downloadable formats. A few are textified, searchable and copiable whereas a large majority of them are still in hard copies and if digitized they are in unsearchable formats. Since they are open source sites, the authors, publishers and digital copy owners control the sharing option, thus without any prior intimation any book may be removed from the site.
Lately many such books are being removed from the above mentioned sites or their metadata tags are being changed making the book search extremely difficult. Altered, removed and broken links to external book sources on the internet will lead to the loss of valuable man-hours put in to find the reference and replace such links.
If the reference book is not available, the electronic links to such references become questionable. Hence having a reliable national Indic Reference Book database is critical for many reasons.
Who are you and Why should we trust you ?
Bharati Kosha Archive is a joint effort by a group of institutions to collaboratively protect digitized Samskrit, English and regional language books from all parts of Bharatavarsha.
Bharati Kosha is an unprecedented effort to secure and safeguard a digital collection exclusively of Indic Knowledge books on Indian Servers. A bring-back-our-heritage initiative, the project aims at building a national repository of our valuable literary heritage by engaging the resources and services available in our country.
While several extensive collections of Indic documents already exist or are getting developed, Bharati Kosha will provide a primary / fallback version of content that is long-lasting and accessible anytime from anywhere. It provides a permanent home for valuable Indic knowledge heritage for posterity. Finally, it makes Indic knowledge amenable to intelligent search, mining and machine-processing to spur innovative applications.
How are you going to finance this effort ?
The project attracts revenue inflow from national and international institutes requesting access to the indexed Indic books via subscriptions.We are exploring several ways to finance our efforts. Please send in your suggestions to us.