Projects

"Documentary heritage reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures. It is the mirror of the world and its memory. But this memory is fragile. Every day, irreplaceable parts of this memory disappear for ever." The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme

Believing in this, and with the help of Michro Ltd, we were able to undertake and accomplish two projects to date, those are:

  1. Endangered Archives Program

    2. The British Library, London initiated a global Endangered Archives Program in 2005 to take up this urgent task of archiving and preserving the printed materials. Professor Atlury Murali was one of the first awardees of the EAP grant meant to preserve pre-1947 Telugu printed materials. See http://eap.bl.uk/database/overview_project.a4d?projID=EAP038;r=6868. The project was successfully implemented: around 2000 rare books were identified, repaired, digitized and microfilmed. The data was sent to the British Library, London for preservation and global access.

    Encouraged by this success and having the impetus to take the movement forward, we have formed this not-for Profit Trust: The Society for Preservation of Indian Art and Culture. With support from Government funding agencies and corporate houses, the Trust is proposing to move into the conservation and preservation of India’s Documentary heritage and simultaneously create free global access to the digital content.

    The entire list of digitized books can be found here.

  2. An OCR engine for regional Indian languages

    3. On 30th March 2011, former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam said at the International World Wide Web Conference in Hyderabad that “Technology not accessible to common man would not make any impact in societal transformation.” He also made a strong plea for increasing contents in native languages on the web, as the biggest hindrance in making the internet ‘truly democratic” has been the language barrier. For Dr. Kalam, that the developed status of a country was directly determined by the amount of contents in the country's native language available on the web.

    The Society for Preservation of Indian Art and Culture has taken the task of developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for Indian languages, to start with Telugu so that the historical content can be made accessible through the internet for regional language communities in South Asia.