Cultural Archiving

Memory Held in One Place Is Memory at Risk

A great deal of what India knows about its own past is not in a library. It is in family collections of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts, in recitation learned by ear, in the working knowledge of a craft, a medicine or a season. Any of it can go in a single generation without anyone deciding to let it go.

What This Work Involves

• Manuscript conservation and cataloguing — stabilising the material, then describing it so that someone else can find it.
• Oral tradition and folklore — recording song, recitation and narrative from the people who carry them, with their consent and their credit.
• Digital preservation — capture to archival standards, so that a file made today is still readable decades from now.
• A digital library — a planned public catalogue, so that what has been preserved can be consulted rather than only stored.