By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, Nov 8: The North-Eastern Hill University has collaborated with Australia’s University of Melbourne for the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (BLEAP).
The programme aims to digitise the cultural history of the two regions of the state — Khasi-Jaintia Hills and Garo Hills — in the form of an archive.
The BLEAP project is administered by the British Library while the funding is done by Arcadia, an international humanitarian organisation whose objective is to preserve the cultural heritage across the globe.
With the programme in the final stages of its completion, a BLEAP public consultation was organised at an upscale hotel on Wednesday to share the status of the project with the stakeholders.
Noted folklorist and NEHU professor, Desmond Kharmawphlang and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Andrew J. May, who are architects of this programme, shared an insight into this project.
May told reporters that the public consultation is a celebration of the project since it was started in 2019.
He said it is a significant programme which invests in endangered cultural materials around the world.
May said in the past four years, they have been looking for cultural materials, endangered documents, newspapers, letters, photographs, and so on with the objective of digitising and preserving them.
He said this will be made available through the websites of the British Library Endangered Archives, NEHU and the University of Melbourne.
Replying to a query, May said they have been able to digitise an important set of collections and there is a huge amount of material they don’t know about.
“So, there’s a lot of material that exists in personal collections that people have in the form of letters, documents or photographs of newspapers or diaries. Some of these materials are kept in the institutions,” he said.
According to him, they have collected a number of such materials from the Assam Club and Sacred Heart Theological College Library, where they had important collections of early Khasi language newspapers that are fragmented and rare and sometimes the only copy that exists.
“These are some of the types of records that we have digitised,” he said.
May also said that the oldest print material comes from around 1902. Some of the printed materials were collected from the Ri Khasi Press founded in the early 1990s.
“We are trying to preserve a number of those early Christian and non-Christians newspapers,” he said.
“There are many areas that remain to be covered. We will apply for funding to extend this project,” he added.
Kharmawphlang said the public consultation was organised with the intention of informing the people who have contributed how their materials have been used as part of the holdings of NEHU and the Australian university apart from the British Library London.
“The project is intended to preserve the documents by digitising them and preserving them systematically. We will not take the documents from them as the copyright belongs to them. The digitised copies will be in the British Library and the NEHU library,” he said.
The endangered and threatened cultural heritage in oral tradition includes folktales, chants (Phawar), rituals and other cultural performances.
Kharmawphlang shared the need to preserve the endangered cultural heritage with a linguist who then suggested that the British Library has a project designed for such purposes.
Kharmawphlang and May had sent a joint letter to the British Library in January 2019.
The project launched in November 2019 was supposed to have been completed within 12 months. It received an extension twice as 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 a storeroom of logs. The pages of the book had fallen apart. It was published in 1954, even Gauhati University does not have a copy anymore.”