Call to digitise Sabah’s heritage, arts collection
KOTA KINABALU: The collection of heritage and arts in Sabah must be digitized and safeguarded in a digital archive.
Professor Dr Jacqueline PughKitingan, a fellow of the Borneo Institute for Indigenous Studies, said a digital archive would be vital to the state as it did not only store things but it also preserved documents or other intangible items relating to cultural heritage.
She said Sabah was rich in its heritage collection and that she had collected thousands of materials as part of her research; all these materials had since been digitized into photographs and audio recordings.
With all these valuable materials at stake, she could not help but to wonder how it could be preserved in the future.
“Many of the people, musicians, and performers that I have interviewed many years ago, have passed away.
“Although, the Sabah museum does have its own facilities and archives, there still needs to be a mechanism whereby copies (of the materials on the late performers) could be stored in other places,” she told reporters when met at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) Sabah seminar on rural creative communities, yesterday.
She recalled on an incident which happened 40 years ago, where the Federal Ministry of Culture and Sports building had burned down and had subsequently lost all of its archives.
Jacqueline, who is a also a professor of Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Heritage at Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), had also noted that the digitization process for these heritage and arts collections might take a lot of time.
She pointed out that a digital archive would protect the intellectual property of both the researcher and the subjects of the person’s research.
“It is important for the people in the future to go back and to be able to listen to the ritual chanting of their community, to listen to their great grandfather playing the sompoton, gagayan…singing or telling stories,” she stressed.