Web storage crunch hits manuscripts mission
NEWDELHI:Having digitised about 2.20 lakh manuscripts with 2.5 crore pages since its launch in 2003, the National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) is facing shortage of web space for its portal where it wants to upload these documents for public access.
As against its requirement of one thousand terabytes (TB), the the government-run National Informatic Centre has promised it a minuscule 50TB space.
About 80,000 DVDs on which the NMM has stored the documents remain stashed in corrugated carton boxes and steel almirahs dumped in the corridors of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.
NMM is India’s ambitious initiative that aims at documenting, digitising 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 700TB space. In total, we may require 1,000TB for the entire project. But we have been promised only 50TB, which does not solve our purpose,” said a senior official associated with the NMM.
The official said that the very idea of allowing the students, scholars, researchers, and authors access to the manuscripts was getting defeated as the mission was unable to upload the soft copies of manuscripts on its website for want of webspace.
The NMM officials are worried the material stored in the DVDs could get washed off or the discs may get corrupted since the DVDs have a finite shelf life.
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, around 60,000 Indian manuscripts were deported in European countries during the British rule while another 150,000 manuscripts in South Asia and other Asian countries.
There are around 5 million manuscripts in India out of which only 1 million have been catalogued so far, according to a report by the Netherlands-based International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ World Library and Information Congress, 2013.