Facing webspace crunch, govt’s digitised manuscripts languish in almirahs, boxes

Having digitized about 2.20 lakh manuscripts with 2.5 crore pages since its launch in 2003, the National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) is facing acute shortage of webspace for its portal where it wants to upload these documents for public access.

As against its requirement of 1000 TBs (tetra bites) web space, it has been promised minuscule 50 TBs only by the government-run National Informatic Centre (NIC).

About 80,000 DVDs on which the NMM has stored up these documents remain stashed in corrugated cartons boxes and steel almirahs dumped in the corridors of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA).

NMM is India’s ambitious mission that aims at documenting, digitizing and preserving about 5 lakh decaying manuscripts.

“We have a huge task of uploading the content of about 80,000 DVDs on our website www.namami.gov.in for which we require about 700 TB space immediately. In total, we may require about 1000 TBs for the entire mission. But we have been promised 50 TB only which does not solve our purpose,” said a senior official working with NMM.

The official said that the very idea of allowing access to the manuscripts for the students, scholars, researchers, and authors was getting defeated as the mission was not able to upload the soft copies of manuscripts on its website for the want of webspace.

The NMM officials worry that since the DVDs have a definite shelf life, the material recorded on these DVDs could get washed off and DVDs may damage in time to come.

The NMM is also working on documenting and digitising manuscripts lying abroad and would need webspace for the same as well for uploading it on its website.

According to the NMM officials, about 60,000 manuscripts migrated to Europe and 1,50,000 to South East Asian countries a long time ago.

First Published: Oct 15, 2017 23:40 IST