Wikisource Conference 2025/Submissions/Wikisource and the British Library: collaborations with Bengali and Javanese communities

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Title of the submitted proposal: Wikisource and the British Library: collaborations with Bengali and Javanese communities
Description: This presentation will explore collaborations between the British Library and Wikisource aiming to engage local communities, raise awareness to library collections, facilitate access to digitised books and manuscripts, and enhance them with accurate transcriptions. Contextualised in a long-standing engagement with Wikimedia-family platforms, projects and initiatives, as well as large-scale digitisation projects of unique and global collections, the British Library collaborated with Bengali communities on two competitions to proofread 19th century Bengali books digitised as part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. More recently, the Library collaborated with the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WiLMa) project, sharing Javanese manuscripts digitised as part of the Yogyakarta Digitisation Project. With Wikimedia Foundation, Wikisource communities and the British Library working with Transkribus to create Machine Learning training models to automate transcriptions in various languages, we would like to encourage and explore further collaborations that would benefit communities worldwide.
Relationship to Wikisource or to the theme: This session is about cross-community collaborations between the British Library and Wikisource, bringing people and memory organisations together to celebrate written heritage collections, and enhance and promote them for research and enjoyment.
Username of speaker(s): Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert (AKS BL)
Session type: Lecture
Duration: 45 mins
Outcomes: Participants will learn about the potential of collaborating with libraries and other heritage organisations that hold vast historical collections, as well as with Transkribus as a world-leading AI platform. Content providers will be encouraged to share their out-of-copyright and openly licensed material with Wikisource, to facilitate access for local communities, raise awareness of unique collections and increase their accessibility and research potential by providing their transcriptions.