Servants of Knowledge

Servants of Knowledge / Open Digital Library of India / Public Resource

Data preservation organization focused on analog-to-digital conversion of books, photographs, recordings, academic and legal documents

Overview

Servants of Knowledge (SoK) is a grassroots digitization initiative based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. It is the India-facing operation of Public Resource, a registered US non-profit charity run by technologist and open-access activist Carl Malamud. The initiative brings together paid staff and community volunteers to scan public-domain and out-of-copyright Indian books, periodicals, palm leaf manuscripts, audio recordings, and films, and to deposit those materials as open-access collections on the Internet Archive. The resulting collection—searchable, downloadable, and accessible to visually impaired users via text-to-speech tools—is intended to serve as a public library for the more than 1.4 billion people of India, compensating for the country's severe shortage of accessible library resources. The name is a deliberate hat-tip to Gopal Krishna Gokhale's Servants of India Society, founded in 1905, and the initiative's rallying cry is Jai Gyan!—"Long live knowledge!"

Background and Founding

The project grew out of a convergence of two open-access efforts in Bengaluru around 2019. Carl Malamud had for years been buying rare Indian books from second-hand bookstores and shipping them to the United States for digitisation, and had established a formal Memorandum of Cooperation with the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) in Bengaluru to digitise the Academy's book collection using a Table Top Scribe scanner donated by the Kahle/Austin Foundation. That scanning effort had, however, begun to lose momentum. Separately, Omshivaprakash H L — a technologist, long-time Wikipedian, and passionate advocate for the Kannada language — had become acutely aware of the lack of Kannada-language references when writing Wikipedia articles. When Omshivaprakash learned of Malamud's work he proposed a community-based model: weekend volunteers would come together at the IAS headquarters to scan books that Omshivaprakash and Malamud had gathered. Malamud, who understood the power of local-language technology and community collaboration, embraced the idea. Out of those early weekend sessions the Servants of Knowledge initiative took shape as a named collective, with the IAS premises serving as the first permanent scanning centre. The work has been made possible in part by grants from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin that supports open access worldwide.

Scanning Operations and Technology

Scanning operations are centred in Bengaluru, with Omshivaprakash H L directing India operations. The initiative uses V-cradle tabletop scanners based on the Internet Archive's open-source Scribe design but reengineered by Omshivaprakash's team and manufactured in India at significantly lower cost. Each scanner uses two DSLR cameras to photograph facing pages simultaneously, and a trained operator can capture approximately 800 pages per hour. By 2023 the initiative was scanning roughly 1.2 to 1.4 million pages per month across multiple active scanning stations in Bengaluru, including at Gandhi Bhavan, the National Law School of India University library, and the Indian Academy of Sciences. After scanning, volunteers apply detailed metadata to make items discoverable on the Internet Archive, and optical character recognition—fine-tuned for a range of Indian-language scripts — renders the text searchable and accessible to screen-reader users.

Collection and Partnerships

The SoK collection on the Internet Archive spans books, speeches, magazines, newspapers, palm leaf manuscripts, audio recordings, and film in over 100 languages. Subject matter ranges across science, literature, law, politics, history, religion, music, and folklore. Major institutional partners include the Indian Academy of Sciences (with a formal Memorandum of Cooperation), the National Law School of India University, Gandhi Bhavan (the largest Gandhian reference library in Karnataka), the JC Bose Trust, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and the publishing house Motilal Banarsidass (for out-of-copyright titles). Mirror facilities have been established at IIT Delhi under Professor Sanjiva Prasad, and the initiative coordinates with regional open-access volunteers for Malayalam (Shiju Alex), Konkani (Prashanth Shenoy), and Tamil (T. Shrinivasan) materials. An advisory board drawn from universities across India includes intellectual-property scholars Arul George Scaria, N. S. Gopalakrishnan, Feroz Ali, and Lawrence Liang. The initiative has also worked closely with Sushant Sinha of Indian Kanoon on OCR software for Indian-language scripts, an effort that produced open-source tools now applied across the collection.

Community and Impact

The initiative operates as what Carl Malamud calls a bottom-up, grassroots public library — "a bunch of people teaching each other." Contributors come through social media and word of mouth. A Kannada teacher named Chaya Acharya, for example, brought in decades of back-issues of the prominent Kannada monthly magazine Kasturi, edited by her grandfather Pavem Acharya, and in searching the SoK collection discovered previously unknown digitised works by him — illustrating how the archive serves both discovery and preservation. The initiative has demonstrated publicly at the Bangalore Literature Festival, where it digitized one lakh pages over two days in front of festival visitors. The collection addresses a documented gap: India has roughly 50,000 public-funded libraries for a population of over 1.4 billion, and access to those libraries is often severely restricted. SoK materials are provided for non-commercial purposes under Indian copyright's fair dealing provisions, and legal counsel has been sought from leading intellectual-property experts to ensure the initiative's activities are grounded in Indian law.

Access and Usage

The Servants of Knowledge collection is freely and openly accessible at archive.org/details/ServantsOfKnowledge. All materials are searchable, downloadable in multiple formats (PDF, EPUB, plain text), and readable online. Text-to-speech accessibility is built into the Internet Archive platform. The collection is posted for non-commercial purposes and is intended to facilitate fair dealing usage for private study, research, criticism, review, and classroom instruction. Institutions, libraries, or individuals wishing to contribute books for digitization or to volunteer can contact the initiative through Public Resource and the Internet Archive.