The Problem
India holds one of the world's most diverse repositories of knowledge — millions of manuscripts, rare printed texts, regional-language books residing in private collections, temple libraries, and local archives. However, the vast majority of it this material exists only in physical form or uncatalogued, and quietly decaying. Most Indian custodians of rare texts lack the budget, technical capacity, or access to commercial digitization services. Traditional Institutional archiving efforts, where they exist, are slow, expensive, and often inaccessible to the communities whose heritage is at stake. The result is an asymmetric loss: the texts and knowledge systems most underrepresented in global digital archives are precisely those most at risk of permanent disappearance.
At ServantsOfKnowledge, we asked: what if any community — a small library, a local trust, a university archive — could build and operate its own digitization pipeline using open hardware and open software?
We have been building open infrastructure to change this. While our open-source book scanner hardware designs are already publicly available, at IndiaFOSS 2026, we are completing the pipeline with the public release of Repub.
Repub workflow - an end-to-end, fully open-source stack that takes a physical book from shelf to searchable, publishable digital artifact.
Repub is a software piece that lives alongside our scanners. The moment a digitization session ends, Repub takes over the scanner's output and runs it through a post-processing pipeline:
Cropping: Using image processing libraries to extract the page boundaries of a book
Deskewing: Rotate the pages in case they are slanted
Dewarping: Removing warping that happens during scanning of a thick book
Searchable PDFs — with embedded OCR text layers
Structured metadata — enabling cataloguing and discovery
Multiple end-user formats — so the output is immediately usable, not just stored
This talk covers:
The crisis of unarchived knowledge in India and why open tools are the only scalable answer
How Repub works: challenges and the solutions
How it integrates with our open hardware scanners to form a complete pipeline
Already in production with 100K books being procesed
The public release: how to get it, use it, and contribute
What's next: a future open-source library management system designed for Indian research institutions
The pipeline is designed to run on commodity hardware, requires No prior archiving or software experience and is fully automated. It handles the hardest part of digitization: turning raw scans into documents that can actually be read, searched, and used by researchers, students, and the public. If you have a belief that India's knowledge belongs to everyone, a quick Digitization Schooling at ServantsOfKnowledge Academy to get you started.
The Bigger Picture
Repub is one piece of a longer roadmap. ServantsOfKnowledge is also developing a next-generation library management system designed specifically for Indian research institutions — built to handle the scale, script diversity, and metadata complexity of India's collections. This too will be open-sourced.
Why This Matters for the FOSS Community
This is FOSS applied to cultural infrastructure. This project demonstrates that FOSS is not only for software products, it is a governance model for cultural infrastructure. Every component we release i.e. hardware, software, documentation lowers the barrier for any community in India to begin archiving their own heritage. The tools do not require institutional budgets or vendor lock-in. They require only the will to preserve.
