e-Culture, Heritage & Tourism – Winner 2014
The Urban History Documentation Archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata began work in 1993 to preserve through copying all available endangered printed and manuscript records relating to the history of civil society in colonial India. In 2009 it embarked on a project (EAP188) supported by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library to identify endangered archival materials and stored in 20 public libraries in the districts of Howrah, Hooghly, 24 Parganas North and 24 Parganas South, all located in semi-urban and rural areas within the proximity of Kolkata, West Bengal.
The project team identified and surveyed all publications published prior to 1950 from these 20 libraries and prioritised eight libraries. As retrieving “all” printed literature is almost an impossible task, the team eliminated all fictions and then prioritised books published on specific subjects, such as, regional history, education, religion, Indian philosophy, medicine and others areas based on the queries it receives from scholars and in consultation with some members of the CSSSC faculty. This project created a huge database of 26,579 books in these eight libraries. The current project, also supported by the EAP and nominated (EAP 341) for Manthan Awards, shortlisted 3700 unique and endangered books and copied them during the period 2010 and 2012. Now the entire archive, one of largest among Bengali language materials, has been uploaded by the British Library on the Endangered Archives Programme server and is available for unrestricted online access.
Project Title : e-Pothi: Online Cataloguing of Manuscripts of Odisha State Museum
Organisation: National Informatics Centre, Odisha State centre
Country : India
Website :
www.odishamuseum.nic.in
Language: English
Email:
rnbehera@nic.in
On behalf of Odisha State Museum, the National Informatics Centre has developed and launched in March 2014 a website under a project called e-Pothi. The website offers visitors two major facilities. The first facility is a searchable e-catalogue and repository of about 37,000 rare palm leaf manuscripts of Odisha preserved and stored in the museum. These manuscripts have been catalogued under 27 categories such as Veda, Ganita, Ayurveda, Jyotisha, Sanskrit Purana, Tantra etc. Visitors can get access to the first and last page of the individual manuscripts and if he/she wants to see/read complete set for research purpose, then there is a facility of online purchase through e-Payment by Credit/Debit/ATM Card/Internet Banking. The digitised manuscripts can be downloaded and printouts can be taken. The second facility is a virtual walkthrough of the Odisha State Museum. Visitors from anywhere in the world can access the website, select any section of the museum, get a panoramic view of the musuem and move around using the cursor giving him or her a realistic feel of being in the musuem. The beneficiaries of the project are the Odisha State Museum, researchers, students and scholars across the globe and common citizens.
e-Culture, Heritage & Tourism – Special Mention 2014
ThePashto.com is a dynamic and user-friendly Pashto-English and English-Pashto online dictionary having more than 16000 words facilitated with all-round grammatical descriptions. The dictionary is designed and devised so as to appeal to a wide array of users, ranging from beginners to advanced users, Pashto and non-Pashto speakers, students, teachers, researchers, lexicographers etc. The user-friendly interface allows the user to add more words/phrases and modify one’s previous entries or delete entries containing discrepancies with ease.
The auto suggestion feature allows any novice to select the requisite word or phrase in English/Pashto to find-out meanings of that very word, and to get closely related word/phrase of the entry searched for. Also, Unicode compliant TTF fonts are installed in the website so that user can easily differentiate between words and their meanings. There are several other Pashto dictionaries online but thePashto.com has certain unique features. It allows three way searching (English, Pashto, Roman), it has an embedded Pashto keyboard, auto suggestions facility, pre-Installed Pashto fonts (Unicode), related words facility, phonetics and user dashboard to add/edit & delete words. The dictionary can be accessed by Android phones while other phones can access through browser.
