Shillong, Niv 8: The North Eastern Hills University (NEHU) has collaborated with the Melbourne University, Australia for the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (BLEAP).
The programme aims to digitize the cultural history of the two regions of the state in the form of digital archives.
The BLEAP project is administered by the British Library, while the funding is provided by Arcadia which is an international humanitarian organization whose objective is to preserve the cultural heritage across the globe.
With the programme on the final stages of its completion, the BLEAP Public Consultation was organized at Tango Hall of Hotel Vivanta on Wednesday to share with the stakeholders on the status of the project.
Noted folklorist and NEHU professor Desmond Kharmawphlang and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Andrew J. May who are architect of this programme, shared an insight on the work which has been done as part of the project.
While speaking to reporters, Prof May said that this public consultation was a celebration of the project which has been done for a number of years which was started in 2019.
He said it was a significant programme which invests in endangered cultural materials around the world.
Professor at the University of Melbourne said that in the past four years they have been looking for the cultural materials, endangered documents, newspaper, letters, photographs and so on with the objective to digitize them and preserve them.
He said that this would be made available through British Library Endangered Archives, NEHU and University of Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Kharmawphlang said that they have organized this public consultation with the intention to inform the people who have contributed how their materials have been used as part of the holdings of the two concerned universities and the British Library London.
“The project is intended to preserve the documents by digitising them. We will not take it from them, the copyright belongs to them and will be preserved in a systematic manner. The digitised copies will be in the British Library and NEHU library,” NEHU Professor said.
The endangered and threatened cultural heritage especially in oral tradition includes folktales, chants (phawar), rituals and other cultural performances.
Kharmawphlang shared the need to preserve the endangered cultural heritage to a linguist who then suggested that the British Library has a project designed for such purposes.
It may be recalled that Kharmawphlang together with May who had sent a joint letter to the British Library in January 2019.
The original timeline of the project which was launched in November, 2019 was supposed to be completed within 12 months.
But the project got an extension since the work could not be started due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a pilot sample, the team started by digitising the book “Folk Literature of Assam”.
Kharmawphlang said, “It is a book I found in the store-room of logs. The pages of the book have fallen apart. It was published in 1954, even Gauhati University does not have the copies anymore.”