|
India, a land of ancient knowledge, has the largest collection
of manuscripts in the world dating back thousands of years, covering different
areas including religion, philosophy, science, medicine, arts and literature.
Composed in various ancient and contemporary Indian languages and scripts like
Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, and Tamil, these manuscripts were written on
diverse materials such as birch bark, palm leaf, cloth, wood, stone and paper.
Unfortunately, these manuscripts are lying in various corners in
utter neglect in libraries, academic institutions, museums, temples and
monasteries, and private collections; and were never complied into a single
repository until now. Realizing the need to restore these invaluable
manuscripts, the Department of Culture took upon itself the task and established
the National Manuscript Mission (NMM) in February 2003. A five-year project, NMM
does not only locate and preserve manuscripts but is also engaged in spreading
awareness. The mission has already created an electronic database for one
million manuscripts even as it has estimated that there are five million
manuscripts in India.
|
|
| Moving the manuscript by hand
through 12 imaging positions |
Mission Critical
One of the most ambitious digitization plans of the government till date,
the department of culture chalked out an ambitious plan to use IT effectively to
identify, catalog, conserve, preserve and disseminate India's manuscripts.
With the assistance of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), a step-by-step
plan was created for a national repository of manuscripts. To achieve this goal,
NMM had to collate and collect information on the manuscripts. Twenty-four
Manuscript Resource Centers (MRCs) were thus identified across the country to
survey, list, and catalog the manuscripts. In the next step, an outline for an
electronic register was created which would capture all the relevant information
from various sources. The NIC came up with a format that would capture
information on institutions, catalogs, subject, author, indexes and the state of
preservation of manuscripts.
Since the manuscripts were in different languages, NIC realized
the need for a multilingual electronic register. Another key need of the
application was transliteration, as the scholars would have wanted to access
data entered in one language while it may have been input in another.
The Solution
Thus was developed Manus Granthavali, the National Electronic Register
application developed by NIC, built using Microsoft's software on Unicode
standards, chosen due to its global acceptance, easier localization of
application and improved multilingual text processing. Manus Granthavali, a
client server application, was built on the .NET platform with Microsoft SQL
Server 2000.
While digitization of ancient manuscripts would serve the
purpose of making these available to future generations, yet some manuscripts
are in a dilapidated condition so much so that it becomes impossible to take
them to any center for digitization for fear of damaging the contents forever.
In order to solve this issue, the government launched a digital mobile lab last
year. The mobile lab will reach the place where the manuscript is stored and
capture the information. This lab for manuscripts will use cutting edge
technology and will integrate space communications, digital imaging and chemical
engineering technologies.
Problems on the Way
India has rich information related to literature, music, traditional system
of medicine and science but all of these are embedded in palm leaves. It is
essential to search, understand and preserve this valuable information for
future generations. Merely scanning the palm leaves would not be very useful as
the number of people who can read the palm leaves and interpret the meanings,
identify the plants and stones mentioned in the palm leaves are few and even
those who can read may not be that fluent in entering all that into computers in
a digital form.
|
|
| Leaf Aptus 75 Digital used by
RIT for restoration work |
The Optical Character Recognition of these ancient scripts is
also a tough problem. India's President APJ Abdul Kalam has suggested that for
every palm leaf scanned, the information read by experts can be stored in an
audio format. "We can then put these on the web and invite other experts to
provide free and fair commentary and validate every palm leaf data. This data
can also be used for creating a new generation of palm leaves reading experts-a
species that has almost vanished," he added.
Projects Abroad
For Restoration of manuscripts by using technology India should take
inspiration from initiatives abroad. Scientists from the Rochester Institute of
Technology (RIT) were involved in the restoration work of a 700-year old Indian
palm leaf manuscript, Sarvamoola Grantha, a collection of 36 erudite
commentaries, which were found in a dilapidated condition
The project is employing cutting edge technology in order to
digitally restore these manuscripts. Revealing the technology, Roger L Easton,
professor RIT who has worked on this project along with PR Mukund, another RIT
professor said, "we used a scientific digital camera which has the Kodak
1602E sensor, 1536x1024 pixels. For this project, we wanted to image at near
infrared wavelengths because we expected that this would enhance the contrast
between the text and the palm leaf "background," which proved to be
correct." The images had a resolution of about 25 pixels per mm, which
required the team to collect about 10-12 images for each leaf and since the
images overlapped considerably, these were digitally "stitched".
Easton informed that these restored manuscripts would now be "preserved on
silicon wafers".
The restoration and digitization work of the invaluable
scriptures, books, songs etc will make the coming generations benefit and learn
from these but so long as the strict conservation standards before digitization
are kept, digitization is the best way to make old manuscripts etc accessible to
the wider public. As N Balakrishnan, IISC professor rightly said: "Since
everything today points towards an Internet-dependent world, one is not wrong
when one says, you are in this world only if you are on Google."
Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
| 
