09 July 2010
June Accessions 2010
Last month we received material from only one project: 'Faces drawn in the sand': a rescue project of Native Peoples' photographs stored at the Museum of La Plata, Argentina - major project.
Led by Dr Irina Podgorny, this project built on the work of an earlier pilot project that successfully identified and re-located 'forgotten collections' within the Museum of La Plata. The major project created microfilm and digital images of 11 Collections. All the material is photographic and include glass plate negatives, celluloid film, glass lantern slides and albumen prints. They are quite amazing. Some of the originals are cracked or damaged because of their age and the project team has done a great job making good quality copies. It was difficult choosing only a few images to show in this post. Here are three:
This project is now finished and the full Collections available for access.
Lynda
27 January 2010
Popular market books from Bengali
This week I have started to work through the images we received as part of the project: Archiving 'popular market' Bengali books.
The project produced digital copies of 2,980 books, covering such diverse subjects as "religion, folk culture, local history, popular literature, pornography and erotica,...fashion and cookery, instruction on traditional rural pursuits such as agriculture and animal farming...instruction on reparing machinery and appliances, citizen's rights, the law, government procedure, public hygiene and social reform." Quite a range!
The project copied books held by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, and from several private collections. Digitising these privately held texts in particular will hugely improve access to this valuable social and cultural resource. This is a significant outcome for the EAP as one of our core aims is to facilitate access to items which would normally not be made available to the public. The majority of our projects are copying material held by private indivuduals or non-government institutions.
As I work through the collections I will post about interesting titles or publication types that I come across, hopefully selecting a book or theme of the week and showing you some of the wonderful, colourful covers and page illustrations. There is a lot to choose from! One of the first books that caught my eye was an edition of ghost stories, published by the Rajendra Library and titled 'agnidrshti'. Here is the cover page:
Here's the contents page:
And here's the graphically illustrated start of a story:
Alex
08 January 2010
December Accessions 2009
Looking over the EAP Accession records it appears most of December was spent processing new material into the library. We received discs, microfilm and hard drives from seven projects! Some of these were continuing transfers from on-going projects. Some were the first receipts from new projects.
Material was received from:
Preserving the archives of the United National Independence Party of Zambia
Collection and digitisation of old music in pre-literate Micronesian society
Study and collection of Hakku Patras and other documents among folk communities in Andhra Pradesh
Digital archive of north Indian classical music
Digitisation of Bolivian indigenous communities' records on ayllu structure, tax and land tenure
Preserving more Marathi manuscripts and making them accessible - major project
This last project is the second undertaken by Dr Feldhaus to copy Marathi manuscripts in India. Her first project, Preserving Marathi manuscripts and making them accessible, was completed in 2007. It successfully microfilmed 300 manuscripts including: works of the Vakari poet-saints from the 13th to the 17th centuries; works of the 'Pandit' poets of the 17th and 18th centuries; notebooks of songs used by performers of kirtans and other types of (mostly Vaishnava) religious performances; manuscripts on yoga, astrology and other kinds of sciences including (interestingly) the science of horses; and manuscripts of the vast literature of the Mahanubhav sect. The project also conducted training for staff in digital preservation and raised awareness of Marathi manuscript collections and their care.
The current major project is continuing to microfilm Marathi manuscripts and training staff. Here is a glimpse of the result:
Lynda
03 October 2009
September accessions
Last month the EAP received material from the following projects:
Tuvalu National Archives major project
Pages of Azerbaijan sound heritage
Digital archive of north Indian classical music
Preserving the archives of the United National Independence Party of Zambia
This provides an interesting mix of government and political records, traditional oral music and classical music. Audio material is always nice to receive as it's very accessible. All I have to do is put on my headphones and click on a track. Some of the written material can be less easy to access because of the variety of languages and scripts the materials display.
That's why I was very pleased to be able to read through some of the papers copied from the United National Independence Party (UNIP) of Zambia. Being official papers from Zambia, these are in English so I was able to indulge my natural curiosity and examine some of the files. These records contain Province Reports, Circulars, Party Provincial Administration papers and general Correspondence.
It was in one of this later file-type dated 1976 that I found a draft copy of a 'secret declaration'. Here it is:
The draft declaration goes through a consultation and re-writing process, all documented in the file. The UNIP collection also contains minutes of the National Council meetings and the National Conventions, speeches, research reports and correspondence with regional party headquarters. The project also copied papers belonging to the African National Congress, dating from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.
22 May 2009
The story of the Yi archives
Human beings use the spoken word and written texts to pass on knowledge. In keeping with the theme of story-telling, here as a part of knowledge transfer, I thought I'd point to the material copied by one of our completed projects: Preservation and digitisation of Yi archives in public and private collections in Yunnan, China. This material is endangered not only from the physical conditons of its storage but also from its history of neglect and unfriendly government policies. The Yi archives contain the history and culture, religious beliefs, etc of minority groups in China.
Texts from the Yi archives, originally, were written for a local audience. They preserve a body of knowledge that is peculiar to the Yi that informs and explains aspects of how they view the world and the afterlife. Their oral literature, as tales or fables, are embedded with traditional wisdom, their clan histories re-tell the past, relating it to the present, and their religious practices help them make sense of the world and their place within it. These stories, histories and rituals belong to the Yi socieites from which they grew. They contain knowledge that connects the generations to each other and to the world as they experience it.
Here is a page recording the beginning of a sutra to pray for fortune:
It is important to preserve what remains of these written records as this will save also the language they are written in. Preservation of the language will in turn allow further study of the Yi people and Yi culture. Texts copied by the project include almanacs, sutras and practices used in ritual, the histories of families and records of oral stories. Traditionally the Yi texts are kept by priests who have responsibility for recording, saving and using them. These records are fast becoming all that is left of the story of the Yi people. For this reason the Project had a strong focus on making them widely available, to facilitate and encourage further research.
This page is from an almanac:
13 May 2009
The importance of story
During May the National Literacy Trust, along with the rest of the UK, is celebrating National Share a Story Month. I thought the EAP blog should join in the fun. Several of our projects have copied manuscripts and printed books that contain stories, tales, myths and popular narratives of all sorts. This post is dedicated to the importance of story and the role stories have in our lives.
One of our projects working in India, Archiving texts in the Sylhet Nagri script, has digitally copied 103 texts. The Sylhet Nagri script was once widely used in north-eastern Bengal. The script was used in both printed texts and hand written manuscripts to record aspects of popular culture, including religious stories. The project copied several texts telling the story of the Battle of Karbala, a significant event in the history of Sunni and Shi'a Islam.
The battle was fought between the adherents of Yazid and the family and followers of Husayn, on Muharram 10 in the 61st year of the Islamic calendar (October 10, 680 CE). Yazid and Husayn both claimed the title and position of Caliph. Husayn and his 72 followers were travelling to Kufa when Yazid, who had a much larger military force, ordered an army to intercept them. Yazid's forces surrounded Husayn at the desert oasis of Karbala.
After days of fruitless negotiations, during which the water supply to Husayn's encampment was cut off, Husayn and his band prepared for the fight that could not be avoided. The night before the battle he offered his followers the choice to flee. None accepted. The battle itself saw Husayn and his male followers killed. The women and children, including Husayn's sister Zainab bint Ali and his son, were taken prisoner.
The story of the Battle of Karbala has been seen as a fight between good and evil - the pious Husayn, who wanted to protect Islam, against the wicked Yazid, who lived impiously and owed his position to greed and bribery. Four tellings of this story have been copied by the EAP Project. Three of these are in compilations that have been called Jamnama, stories of wars and battles. These texts also contain "Jari" songs. The story is told and the songs are sung together. The other edition of the story is in a text that has been called Sahide Karbala.
The version of the story told in the Jamnama is significant for its literary innovations and the creative narrative style that made this story of a distant land rouse spontaneous and heartfelt emotions in different regions of Bengal.
National Share a Story Month is organised by the Federation of Children's Book Groups.
05 March 2009
Collapse of Cologne City Archives
On 5 March the Cologne City Archive building collapsed. The archive contained over 26 kilometres of records dating back to the 10th century. This includes the personal papers of Nobel prize-winning author Heinrich Boell and records belonging to the composer Jacques Offenbach, Karl Marx, Hegel, and West Germany’s first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer - as well as photographs, maps and rare books. How much will be recovered is still unknown.
This disaster brought home just how fragile archives are, and how important. The people of Cologne have lost a vital link with their past. As a story from The Times states: 'The German city of Cologne woke up yesterday without a memory'. This memory loss, however large it turns out to be, will touch not just Cologne but the whole of Europe and the world.
Increasingly, libraries and archives are copying their holdings partly to mitigate the effects of a disaster. This has been going on for a long time, and indeed records from the Cologne City Archives had been copied onto microfilm and stored in another location. Many of the records copied as part of the EAP are endangered because they are at risk of being damaged or lost through disasters such as fire and flood. Many simply exist in unhealthy storage environments.
One of the more unusual threats to archives is butter lamps. The project Digital documentation of manuscript collection in Gangtey made digital copies of Buddhist manuscripts from Gangtey Monastery in Bhutan. These manuscripts are kept at the monastery and are in danger of accidentally being burnt from the butter lamps used by the monks. The project successfully digitised the entire collection of manuscripts at Gangety.
Most of these were written in the 17th century and are beautiful artefacts in their own right. Many were written in the dbu can calligraphy and begin with miniatures of the Buddha and Buddhist hierarchs.
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