National Archives of India set to get a digital makeover of its vast repository

NEW DELHI: The National Archives of India (NAI), the custodian of some of the country's most valuable manuscripts and records, plans to rope in technology companies to create a new avatar of the voluminous physical texts housed in its sprawling colonial-era building in the national capital.

The 125-year-old body is home to priceless articles of Indian history such as centuries old Buddhist texts, official records maintained by the East India Company and papers related to the final years of freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose.

At a recent meeting with IT industry forum Nasscom, Raghvendra Singh, director general of the National Archives, proposed that IT companies come forward to digitise a part of the national records as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme — a proposal that the government will first test through a pilot programme.

"The idea is not just to digitise the documents, but also to create a "convergence" where links to archives of other ministries or states could be provided for a certain topic to make research simpler," Singh told ET.

Currently, over 90 per cent of the records are in original paper format and are susceptible to decay and destruction. Moreover, scholars looking for research material have to visit the archives in person and request for a document to be retrieved, a process that can take anywhere between a few weeks to months.

Online Archives Behind Paywall
Shrikant Sinha, CEO of Nasscom Foundation, said the industry forum is exploring the best methods to undertake such a mammoth exercise of national importance. "The NAI's vast content, with millions of documents, is a key national heritage, and making that content accessible to India and the world is a very exciting prospect."

One of the models being considered is to position this as part of the Indian Public Libraries Movement, an initiative started by Nasscom Foundation with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to reposition public libraries.

"It won't take much for them since they have the wherewithal — for example, the British Library runs an 'adopt a book' campaign, we could start an 'adopt a series' initiative for the IT companies," said Sanjay Garg, deputy director general at NAI.

Apart from granting researchers the ability to access content from anywhere anytime, digitised images are often even better than the originals due to image enhancement technologies.

The earliest record with the Archives is from 1342, from the time of Feroz Shah Tughlaq, and digitising assets like these will significantly enhance the value of the archives. To drive home this point, Garg cited the example of the 4th Century Buddhist texts called the Gilgit manuscripts which have been digitised and compiled into a book. "They are even better and clearer than the original because of the use of several softwares," he said.

NAI already has a digitisation process underway through a third party agency with support from the electronics and IT ministry. A total of 40 lakh papers have been digitised so far with 11 lakh private archives and 19 lakh public records.

ON DEMAND DIGITISATION
Singh said there is also a proposal to offer an on-demand digitisation facility. "This may help us in digitising the most relevant or most in demand records first instead of going through the entire archives in a linear fashion," said Singh. The online archives, however, will not come free. They will be put behind a 'paywall' for the Archives office to be a 'selfsustaining' organisation.

Governments the world over have recognised the need to digitise their archives. According to the website of the National Archives of the UK government, it began to shift to digital over ten years ago, and now digitises around 8 million pages of archival material every year. It says that it delivers over 200 documents online for every one delivered in the reading rooms. On the other hand, the US National Archives and Records Administration has unveiled a strategic plan for 2014–2018 under which it plans to work to digities selected records, including those most requested by researchers, and will put searchable descriptions of all its holdings online.