The history of biology in India will soon get its own space

BENGALURU: The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) is creating an archive of biology in India and also opening it to the public. The old lab of the institute’s founder, Prof Obaid Siddiqi, will be converted into a 1,500-sq-ft archives space which, besides chronicling NCBS’s past, will catalogue the history of contemporary biology in the country.

“We want to create a communitygathering space where technicians, scientists and researchers helping create the archive will meet historians who make sense of their work; journalists, poets or playwrights who narrate their stories to a broader audience, and members of the public,” said Venkat Srinivasan, visiting scientist at NCBS who is heading the project. Communities do not interact as often as they should otherwise, he said, adding: “We should open our doors to the public by October.”

The archive, mooted when NCBS celebrated its silver jubilee in 2016, will include collections of eminent members of the scientific community, including Obaid Siddiqi, KS Krishnan and Ravi Sankaran, donated by family members. Working closely with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), the archive is also collaborating with institutes including Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Puducherry’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library and Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science (IISc).


“We are reaching out to archives in the USA and Australia to get an idea of global best practices and are in the early stages of collaboration with the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative of the University of Virginia,” said Srinivasan. “The idea is to enable a diversity of stories that exist within documents and photographs, capture the process and context of sciences and offer the space to the larger public.” About 25 students from across Bengaluru are being provided internships for putting the archive together.

Another component of the project is to set up a digital catalogue and an open-source portal that will help people access content more easily. Once the archive is set, the team plans to approach the public for documents, lab notes, photos or old equipment of relevance. A monthly lecture series is also planned to create interactions and awareness around the archive.

Independent archivist Sowmithri Ranganathan, who worked with the IISc archives for seven years till 2017, said that the NCBS archives should ensure that the collection is updated at regular intervals. “The institute leadership should also have a longterm vision and be passionate about what shape they want it to take.”