The document summarizes Kaniyam Foundation's projects to digitize Soviet Tamil publications and small magazines from 1970-1980s. The foundation aims to identify, catalog, digitally preserve and provide open access to around 200 Soviet books and 500 magazine issues within a year. It is working with the UTSC Library for collection funding support. The digitized content will have bilingual metadata and be released on websites like Soviet.FreeTamilEbooks.com. The Soviet books covered various topics like science, politics, literature and were important for promoting education in Tamil. The small magazines spanned different genres and were published by individuals and organizations.

1. Digitization of Tamil Soviet Publications
and Small Magazines
Shrinivasan
Lenin Gurusamy
Kaniyam Foundation
21 Jan 2023

2. Kaniyam Foundation
Started as E Magazine - Kaniyam.com
Promotes Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in
Tamil
Collaborate with Wikimedia, Mozilla, OpenStreetMap,
UTSC Library

3. Vision
An environment where all virtual resources, tools and
knowledge related to Tamil language and ethnic groups are
accessible, free and open to all.
Mission
To ensure that use of Tamil language is advanced, parallel
to social, economic and scientific developments and to
provide knowledge and resources free and open to all.

4. Activities
Kaniyam.com A Portal for Ebooks and Articles in Tamil Language for Free/Open Source Software
FreeTamilebooks.com - A Portal for Ebooks in all genre in Tamil Language in , sharable, Creative Commons License. 845
ebooks were published so far.
SangaElakkiyam.org A Portal for all Old Sangam Literature books in Tamil
Olipedia - Youtube channel for audio books in Tamil
Forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org - Online Discussion forum in Tamil for FOSS
Free Software Development, Tamil Open Source Conference, Workshops

5. Free Tamil Ebooks
Web and Mobile portal for Creative Commons licensed works

6. SangaElakkiyam.org
Web and Mobile portal for Sangam Corpus

7. Vizhi Tamil
Mobile app to convert Tamil pdf to text

8. Forum
Forums.TamilLinuxCommunity.org
Provides support for FOSS in Tamil

9. Free Software Development, Conference, Workshops
OCR4wikisource - Connected Google OCR
and Wikisource projects, which gave new
opportunities for all india wikisource projects.
Open-Tamil - Python library for Tamil NLP
research
Tamil Open Source Conference 2019, 2022
Part of KanchiLUG, ChennaiLUG,
VillupuramGLUG
Online/Offline workshops on FOSS
technologies

10. Digitization of Tamil Soviet Publications
The objective of this project is to identify, catalogue, digitally preserve, and provide
open access to the Tamil Soviet publications.
● Target: 200 books
● Bilingual metadata
● Schedule: 1 year
● Collection Funding Support: UTSC Library

11. Soviet Tamil Books
Published and printed by publications supported by Soviet Union (1970s - early 1990s)
such as Mir, Radhuga, and Progress Publishers.
High quality translated works covering many domains, including science, politics,
economics, history, literature (novel, short stories, poetry) and children literature.
Played a similar role like The American Ceylon Mission (ACM) and BBC

12. Importance of Soviet Tamil Books
Pioneer in publishing colourful, illustrated children books.
Brought great Russian literature into Tamil, which fostered generations of readers, writers, and creators.
Promoted science and political awareness among youth.
The works promoting USSR politics/history/economics were used by left wing parties and movements.
Cost was very affordable. Sold via vans in most of the small villages too, along with small science exhibitions.
Most of the Tamil people born from 1960-1990 have been touched by these books. These books helped them
improve their knowledge, skills and life.

13. Science Books

14. History, Economics, Politics Books

15. Children Books

16. Russian Literature

17. Identifying and Collecting the books
Few private book collectors
Local Libraries
Old book stores
Outreach on social media
Political organizations
Political Libraries

18. Cataloging/Metadata
● Bilingual metadata
● Dublin Core based
● We are in the process of learning and using metadata best practices.

19. Scanning
● CZUR ET 18 pro
● Xerox Workcenter 7435
● 300 Dpi
● Tiff
● Generate pdf after post processing

20. Post Processing
CZUR Software

21. Post Processing
ScanTailor

22. Open Access Release
Soviet.FreeTamilEbooks.com

23. Digitization of Small Magazines
The objective of this project is to identify, catalogue, digitally preserve, and provide
open access to a collection of small magazines in Tamil.
● Target: 500 issues
● Bilingual metadata
● Schedule: 1 year
● Collection Funding Support: UTSC Library

24. Small Magazines
- Various Genres
- Short lived
- Available with collectors only
- Published by Individuals, organizations

25. Copyright
The copyright for the Soviet Russia books are still with USSR. Though technically, there is no
USSR, to claim copyright.
The small magazines are ranging from 1970-1980. We will try to find the copyright owners and
try to get the copyright, if possible.

26. Team
Anwar Udhayan Info Farmer Lenin Shrini Chandru
Collection QA Metadata Scanning Project Mgmt Scanning

27. Questions ?