Grants:Project/Rapid/Enriching the Arabic Wikisource with Arabic and Ottoman books in the public domain from the American University Libraries Archives/Report
Draft report
This is a draft of a grant report for a grant funded for fiscal year 2017-18. Please do not respond or comment on it just yet: it's not yet ready for review. To read the approved grant submission, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Enriching the Arabic Wikisource with Arabic and Ottoman books in the public domain from the American University Libraries Archives.Goals[edit]
All goals were achieved: 20 books were added to the Arabic Wiksource project starting from April 2022 till September 2022.
Outcome[edit]
| Target outcome | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
| Scanning & adding the texts of 20 old rare books (mostly Arabic and at least 1 or 2 Ottoman) in ar.Wikisource | All 20 titles were scanned and added. 19 in Arabic and 1 in Ottoman Turkish: book 1, 2 (Ottoman), 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 | Target was reached. Time period had to be extanded till the end of September 2022 due to the ongoing crisis in Lebanon, including the shortage in daily electricity feed which led to longer hours of work. Thankfully, that was enough to reach the target. |
Learning[edit]
What worked well? What didn't work so well? What would you do differently next time?:
- Generally, the majority of the project went smoothly
- The time period required to complete the task always felt short due to the ongoing crisis in Lebanon, as previously explained, and due to the books being of different lengths. Also, the OCR tool sometimes had trouble extracting Arabic letters from scanned images, especially with pictures with white backgrounds or small Arabic text, sometimes giving meaningless words, and at other times recognizing the text as Persian, which required me to write some pages or parts of it, manually.
- For future similar projects, I would definitely ask for a more extended time period to complete the target, if the number of books was as high as it is in this project. I would also focus on one or two authors at most, as I came to believe that it's better to complete preserve all of a person's work instead of choosing random titles.
Finances[edit]
Grant funds spent[edit]
Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.
- Transport + Internet + electrical generator + Library expenses + Other = 2000$
- Data (personal internet costs): 200$
- Transportation costs: 500$ (exceeded expectation due to the instability in the prices of Gas and the local currency)
- Bank Transfer Fee: 50$
- Library expenses (scanning, internet...etc): 100$
- electrical generator subscription: 780$ (130$ a month).
- Government electricity subscription: 25$
- Other expenses: a battery-powered fan (was needed to make my work more comfortable during the summer heat) = 145$, laptop maintenance = 200$
Remaining funds[edit]
Do you have any remaining grant funds?
- All of the grant was spent.
Anything else[edit]
Anything else you want to share about your project?
- Thanks to everyone who was involved in approving this grant, and to those who provided moral support and encouragement till this project was completed.