http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories-of-the-internet/archives-and-access/call-for-a-south-asian-collective-of-archivists-and-historians
Call for a South Asian Collective of Archivists and Historians by Aparna Balachandran — last modified Jun 22, 2009 11:32 AM Filed Under: * Open Access In this blog entry, CIS-RAW researchers Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto (working on the project 'Archive and Access), along with five other researchers, invite archivists, librarians and historians from South Asia to form a collective that focuses on issues of access. If we could eavesdrop on informal conversations between historians on their experiences of working in archives, we would probably chance upon a rich trove of stories. Many of these would have to do with the tragi-comic experience of accessing, finding and handling precious material that is sure not to survive the conditions in which it is stored. Yet, the conditions of preservation, while undoubtedly important, are scarcely the only concern when we approach the question of the archive. A conventional approach to archives would be one that sees manuscript and paper archives as a source for researchers alone, or as a pedagogic appendage, or as a national legacy, held permanently in safekeeping away from those whose psyche it is supposed to buttress. As a generality however, taking an average archive into consideration, preservation is achieved by exercising tight control on disappearing documents. While archives of the contemporary often discuss questions of public access and rights of digital publics, they skirt around the issue of accessing relatively protected government archives. The transition from print to digital format does not ensure that issues of state ownership, access and generating potential different users for archives will be addressed. In fact it is only too easy to imagine continuous control across the transition to another technology. On another note, the transition to digital technology and private ownership has actually presented archivists and historians with a further quandary. The digital archive in a well-funded private university setting such as can be found in the US, or in a state institution as in the UK is often set up as a private asset that enables holding organizations to use digital technology to ‘complete’ their archival collections, drawing in private collections from countries that cannot afford preservation and enhancing their own closed holdings. It may be well to set aside a nationalist perspective here, for it can be argued that those documents that are withheld from public circulation in India are at least available elsewhere, even if it is difficult to access them. The issue here is that while currently the archives continue to be housed and controlled by national institutions, we probably cannot retain a nationalist perspective to address the question of archives anymore. Aside from being positioned between two approaches: a rapid acquisition policy with respect to private holdings and a relatively inaccessible state policy, we could also be seen as the (illegitimate?) repository of other national holdings. Communities disaffected from the nation see their archival holdings as illegitimately if safely housed in dominant regional libraries. Each area could possibly produce varying positions vis-à-vis the nationalist perspective and not just about illegitimacy of ownership. These will be rendered untenable if one sustains a singularly nationalist perspective on the archive. What is at issue is that we currently have a restricted number of print archive models at hand. The most dominant are the stateist and the knowledge economy model. The knowledge economy model seeks to make a single repository such as a well-funded University library, the single largest holding of historical material; an asset into which other Universities can buy. II How do we, as historians of India (and perhaps necessarily Indian historians) situate ourselves with respect to these two models? As a first move, there is a need to shift from seeing ourselves in relation to the state archives alone, or as a relatively silent entity positioned between the state and the knowledge economy, dependent on individual research grants for a few to access overseas archives. This note is an invitation to archivists, librarians and historians from South Asia to form a collective that focuses on issues of access. The collective will have no legal status, and will function as an interest group with a rotating central committee with a rotating advisory board currently consisting of Professors Neeladri Bhattacharya (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and Lakshmi Subramaniam (Jamia Millia Islamia). Members of the collective will be invited to be a part of an online discussion forum that will attempt to address a range of issues including: * The paucity of public information about state and private archival collections, big and small, in South Asia. This would include the nature of collections and users; as well as the presence of exchange and other policies, extent of digitization etc. * The identification of specific cases where some form of intervention by the collective could help facilitate conversations about both preservation and access between the owners/administrators of archives and their users, with the hope that dialogue of this kind will lead to positive action in this regard. * The creation of agreements between private collectors and families, and public repositories that safeguard the ethical and legal rights original holders may want over their collections, while ensuring public access. * The creation of greater public awareness on these issues, in particular, to solicit the participation of regional and local historians whose concerns may well be different from those in Delhi or Calcutta. * To suggest other objectives for such a collective – such as identifying different ways to fund instruction in languages that are fast becoming purely research languages, such as Old Kannada, Persian, Modi, Old Portuguese, Awadhi etc, particularly those that do not currently have a political significance that ensures state or public support. The first possible point of interest that can involve Delhi-based members is the Central Secretariat Library. The current director of the Central Secretariat Library in Delhi speaks enthusiastically about the interest historians have in the collection housed in his library. The Library houses nineteenth century documents, rare books, and significantly for this note, a copy of every microfilmed or digitized document that has been generated through agreements between state institutions and foreign entities such as the Digital South Asia Library, a consortium housed in the University of Chicago. The films deposited by DSAL are of great potential relevance to students and researchers, but are currently not completely catalogued and are unavailable because of the absence of a working microfilm reader. This kind of situation has great potential if a collective of historians were to approach the Central Secretariat Library for a collaborative effort towards cataloguing the collection, perhaps preparing a grant for its digitization, for which the Library may have funds, and to work out an agreement where the Library stores the microfilm, but its digital copy can be stored by a state university and disseminated from there. Mr. Goswami, the current director, emphasizes that such a collective would be a very useful entity. It would function as a persuasive force, as evidence that the funds allocated for digitization or preservation are in fact needed, and that an audience exists for such material. It would also help address our concern, that the documents drawn from Indian or South Asian collections enhance the holdings of affluent university or academic bodies and are rarely made available to South Asian researchers. There are already available cases where private archives have been successfully transferred to a public location. The Research Centre for Women’s Studies (RCWS), SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, for instance, now houses the Dr. Avabai and Dr. Bomanji Khurshedji Wadia Archive of private papers and other possessions. Similarly, the visual archive at the CSSS Calcutta has arrived at agreements through which to acquire family collections that are microfilmed, digitized, and housed at CSSS. While the democratization of the archives involves much more than preservation or digitization, the initial moves towards bringing them into a format and institution that enhances public access can best be made by those who already regularly use them. Please reply with specific suggestions or to sign up to the collective to receive emails to publicarchi...@yahoo.com, or use our discussion forum, www.publicarchives.wordpress.com. Aparna Balachandran Rochelle Pinto Neeladri Bhattacharya Uma Chakravorty Lakshmi Subramaniam Veena Naregal Prachi Deshpande
