Members of the Two Centuries of Indian Print team have just returned from a fascinating trip to Delhi where we took part in a packed programme of activities organised as part of the Association for Asian Studies conference.

We spent most of the week with a group of archivists brought together from a variety of academic and cultural institutions across India and as far away as Cambodia and Australia. What united us was a shared passion for preserving South Asian heritage. As part of the program we led a workshop on Digitisation Standards as practiced by the British Library which also considered the key challenges organisations face when digitising cultural heritage material, including everything from selecting material and scanning, through to post-processing, online display and user engagement. The workshop also featured a paper on the IFLA guidelines for digitisation and (what we hope) was fun activity in which archivists were presented with different case studies of archival collections and asked to consider a digitisation strategy. It certainly sparked a lot of conversation! See photo below

 

Workshop participants taking part in a group activity

 

Undeterred by the inhospitable weather occupying Delhi, we ventured out and were fortunate enough to receive some very thorough and illuminating tours of the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, Centre for Art and Archaeology, The National Archives, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and Sangeet Natak Akademi where we learned about their respective collections, conservation facilities and digitisation projects.

 

Taking part in a tour of the audiovisual lab at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology 

 

This marked the end of a trip which has connected us with inspiring professionals who we hope to collaborate on more events in the near future.

Our thanks go out to the organisers of what turned out to be a very engaging week of activities, to the American Institute of Indian Studies, to Ashoka University, and to the hosts of our workshop, the India International Centre.