By Carl Malamud

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO HERE

Please join us on June 14 at the Internet Archive for a special event celebrating our collections from India including the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi and much, much more. Our doors open at 6 p.m. with a reception and our program starts promptly at 7 p.m.

Our special guest for this event will be Hon. Dr. Sam Pitroda, a former senior advisor and Cabinet Minister under 3 Prime Ministers and widely acknowledged as the father of the telecommunications revolution in India, the man who brought a telephone to every village in India. Dr. Pitroda will be joined by Hon. Ambassador Venkatesan Ashok, Consul-General of San Francisco. Rounding out our program will be Carl Malamud of Public Resource and the Internet Archive’s own Brewster Kahle.

Our event will be celebrating three collections hosted at the Internet Archive:

First, the Internet Archive is delighted to be hosting a mirror of the Digital Library of India, a collection of 463,000 books in 50 languages. The collection was created in India under government auspices and features 45,000 books in Hindi, 33,000 in Sanskrit, 30,160 in Bengali, and much more. In addition to hosting a mirror of the collection, the Internet Archive is adding value to the collection by creating e-books, using optical character recognition, and improving the metadata and cataloging information.

Second, we will feature the Hind Swaraj collection, materials that are integral to the story of Indian independence. Here you can read all 100 volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, as well as the complete writings of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. You can also listen to 129 audio recordings from All India Radio of Gandhiji speaking at prayer meetings and view all 53 episodes of the remarkable television series Bharat Ek Khoj.

Third, we will discuss additional collections of Indian materials, such as thousands of photographs from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and other sources which Public Resource hosts on Flickr and a collection of all technical public safety India Standards hosted on the Internet Archive and the Public Resource site.

Carl Malamud and Sam Pitroda have spent several years building out these collections. We hope you will join us at this event to hear more about how this came to pass and what the plans are for making this material ever more useful. We also hope to have some exciting announcements as well about new resources that will be available.

Universal access to knowledge is the goal of the Internet Archive. We are delighted to celebrate the immense contributions of India and the vital role both India and the United States—the world’s largest democracies—play in make knowledge available to all. Please join us on June 14!

When: Wednesday, June 14th. Doors open at 6 p.m. for food and drinks, and program starts at 7 p.m.
Where: Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave. SF, CA 94118