Centre for Internet and Society

The Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond

sneha-pp — 2016-01-28T08:25:18Z

Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.

The Zen of Pad.ma

Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.

Biographies

Sebastian Lütgert, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.

Jan Gerber, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma

Re:wiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan

nishant — 2011-09-21T07:23:44Z

First draft of the monograph on "Rewiring Bodies" by Dr. Asha Achutan; format for Microsoft Office users

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc

Openness, Videos, Impressions

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:23:13Z

The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.

The notion of free and open is under great debate even under that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different, often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.

Open video, in that matter, has gone through different iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective hearing, through the day: Access, Archive, Share, Remix, Repurpose. And it is these five that we need to now imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups today.

Access has been one primary question that almost everybody dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements, where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access, privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something that different participants have voiced the need for.

Archive is a preoccupation with most people because archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to different people, there are older questions of representation, voice, empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of access, distribution etc.

Sharing is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do we share it with? Tools by which sharing leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks can be built up?

Remix has been of great value because it means that you are being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc. can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic and mechanics seems to have emerged.

Repurpose is my additional reading of something that perhaps needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms, protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport

Launch of Public Juris (An Online Archive of Legal Resources)

aparna — 2015-04-24T12:07:59Z

Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijit Bhattacharya announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal resources.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal sources and would like to elicit the active participation of the scholarly community in conceptualizing and building Public Juris as a site where we are able to provide access to material needed for law and social science research in South Asia. We would very much appreciate feedback, support and collaboration as we develop this project.

Who we are: We are two historians (Rochelle Pinto and Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore) and an archivist (Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Kolkata) who are interested in issues of technology, users and access in relation to state and private archives in India (see blog).

The Project: We are soliciting contributions for an online digital archive of legal sources called “Public Juris” focusing on, but not limited to, South Asia. We hope this archive will be a useful and easily accessible resource for historians and other scholars interested in the study of different aspects of the law. We see this archive as particularly useful to students and teachers in South Asia and elsewhere who for logistical, economic or political reasons may not be able to travel to libraries and archives in order to access material of this kind. Eventually, we envisage that an online archive of this kind will allow students to broaden the thematic and regional range of their research.

How it will work: We do not have any strict definition of what constitute legal sources — they could range from acts and regulations to court cases, police records and petitions. For example, one set of records that has already been contributed to the archive centres on disputes over ceremonial privileges between the Valangi and Idangai castes in the city of Madras in the early nineteenth century. Documents that are not usually archived, such as leaflets, pamphlets, people’s enquiry reports, photographs, and advertisements, but which are critical to understanding the relationship between law and the public, can also find a space here. The material could be in any language.

As a community of scholars we are in possession of resources that can be harnessed usefully and inexpensively. All of us, for instance, have material collected from different locations that we have already used for our research or which is simply superfluous. This research could be shared. Since the archive inevitably leaves different traces for specific readings by different researchers, our research material could be put to other uses in other works. Hence, just as the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance has asked for your writings for their library, we would like to extend our request for collaborative energies within the LASS community to contribute to constructing a shared resource. Please do claim authorship of this archive by sharing with us material that you think should define and belongs in Public Juris.

Modalities: If you would like to contribute to this online archive, we request you to either bring the material with you when you attend the inaugural LASSNET conference in January, or if you prefer, send it by post to the Centre for Internet and Society (Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore, Karnataka 560052, India). We will undertake to scan the material and make it available on the Public Juris website which is in the process of being constructed and designed. We will acknowledge the contributor on the website, unless specifically asked not to do so. We will also make sure that once scanned, the material will be sent back to the contributor

If you have any questions about this initiative, please do contact aparna@cscs.res.in or rochelle@cscs.res.in. If you would like to contribute to the archive, please do contact us and let us know what kind of materials you would be willing to provide. We look forward to hearing from you.

Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Rochelle Pinto, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences

In conversation with

Pratiksha Baxi, Anchor, LASS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/announcing-the-launch-of-public-juris

Digital Humanities and New Contexts of Digital Archival Practice in India

sneha-pp — 2019-12-18T10:32:07Z

Puthiya Purayil Sneha attended and presented at a conference on 'The Arts, Knowledge, and Critique in the Digital Age in India: Addressing Challenges in the Digital Humanities' organised by Sahapedia and Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad on November 28-29, 2019.

Conference: Website (external)

Digital humanities and new contexts of digital archival practice in India

This is the abstract of Sneha's presentation on digital humanities in India and transitions in digitization and cultural archival practices in the postcolonial context. The presentation was part of a session titled 'Community and Knowledge.'

The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors in India. In space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) in particular, there have been several initiatives undertaken by state institutions, along with individual and collaborative efforts to digitize and make cultural heritage and educational content available online. The growth of new areas of research and creative practice like digital humanities has also brought to the fore the need for digital corpora, including new technologies and methods of research as ways to engage with cultural content through the development of digital pedagogies and creative practice.

Many of these questions are located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. While digitization and archival practice form a significant aspect of the discourse on digital humanities, there still exist a number of anxieties around its practice. Especially in the case of community-led efforts, such as archiving oral histories or GLAM initiatives with collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikimedia, challenges of the digital divide are persistent, reflecting also a larger politics around the growth and sustenance of cultural heritage projects and the humanities and arts more broadly. Drawing upon excerpts from work on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in cultural archives, this presentation seeks to understand the practices and politics of digitization and archival work today, and how it continues to inform the growth of fields like digital humanities in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-and-new-contexts-of-digital-archival-practice-in-india

CIS's Statement at SCCR 24 on Exceptions & Limitations for Libraries and Archives

pranesh — 2012-07-25T10:54:38Z

This was the statement delivered by Pranesh Prakash on Wednesday, July 25, 2012, at the 24th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights on the issue of exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We would like to associate ourselves with the statements made by International Federation of Library Associations, Electronic Information for Libraries, Knowledge Ecology International, Conseil International des Archives, Library Copyright Alliance, Computer and Communications Industry Association, and the Canadian Library Association.

The Centre for Internet and Society would like to commend this house for adopting SCCR/23/8 as a working document on the issue of exceptions and limitations on libraries and archives. This issue is of paramount interest the world over, and particularly in developing countries. I would like to limit my oral intervention to three quick points, and will send a longer statement in via e-mail.

First, we feel that this committee should pay special attention to ensuring that digital works and online libraries and archives such as the Internet Archive, also receive the same protection as brick-and-mortar libraries.

Second, we are concerned that we have been seeing some delegations advancing a very narrow interpretation of the three-step test. Such a narrow interpretation is not supported by leading academics, nor by practices of member states. A narrow interpretation of the three-step test must be squarely rejected. In particular, I would like to associate CIS with the strong statements by IFLA and KEI to maintain flexibilities within exceptions and limitations, instead of overly prescriptive provisions encumbered by weighty procedures and specifications.

We have comments about parallel trade as well, drawing from our experience and research in India, and will send those in writing.

Libraries and archive enhance the value of the copyrighted works that they preserve and provide to the general public. They do not erode it. Exceptions and limitations that help them actually help copyright holders. The sooner copyright holders try not to muzzle libraries, especially when it comes to out-of-commerce works, electronic copies of works, and in developing countries, the better it will be for them, their commercial interests, as well as the global public interest.

Thank you.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-statement-sccr24-libraries-archives

Archives and Access: Introduction

aparna — 2015-04-24T12:05:44Z

The members of this research project team are Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and Abhijit Bhattacharya from the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Calcutta. This intial post tries to outline the concerns underlining this project which will attempt to critically examine archiving practices and policies in India in order to conceptualize ideas about ownership and use towards the goal of the greatest public good; reflect on issues of digitization and access; and facilitate public conversations and the articulation of a collective voice by historians and other users on possible interventions in these institutions.

This project argues that there is a pressing need to apply the questions and concerns that have arisen around the contemporary archives – of ownership, access and use – to the historical archive. The ‘conventional’ approach sees manuscript and paper archives solely as a source for researchers, or as a pedagogic appendage, or as a national legacy, held permanently in safekeeping either by privately held collections or particularly in tightly controlled state archives. In contrast, contemporary archives (often in a digitized format) allow users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data and thus poses some challenging questions to a conventional approach to the archives. Again, the potential access it offers to non-specialist users interrogates the idea of archival collections meant for academic consumption alone.

This project will consider the ways to conceptualize a move away from a relationship from both the state or knowledge economy driven models of archiving. Instead it will explore the possibilities that technology holds out to enhance control, centralization and exclusivity, or to dissipate it. It will also focus on questions of access; on who potential users are; on mutually recognized open access policies between institutions, and on finding interest groups and archive-related projects and other contexts for use of the archives.

Importantly, it will also discuss the embedding of the archive within the construct of a cultural legacy. It will attempt to compare the significance of the archive to that of the painting, or sculpture or architecture and the similarities and differences that can be cited inclusive of things that are not manuscripts and texts.
Towards this end, this project will focus on three sites: it will examine the National Archives of India; as well as consider Goa and Tamil Nadu as incidental territories which enable a view of distinct issues that emerge in the interface between technology and society in the context of archiving.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archives-and-access-introduction

Archives and Access

praskrishna — 2015-04-17T11:06:20Z

The monograph by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving. By examining the Tamil Nadu and Goa state archives, along with the larger public and state archives in the country, the monograph looks at the materiality of archiving, the ambitions and aspirations of an archive, and why it is necessary to preserve archives, not as historical artefacts but as living interactive spaces of memory and remembrance. The findings have direct implications on various government and market impulses to digitise archives and show a clear link between opening up archives and other knowledge sources for breathing life into local and alternative histories.

Download the Monograph

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/archives-and-access/archives-and-access

Archive and Access: The Inalienable Right to the Archives - Entering the Capital

rochelle — 2011-08-23T04:42:13Z

This entry complements the prior discussion by Aparna Balachandran of the Delhi State Archives and its status as a repository of records. Her discussion compares the place of the user and that of the document in the Delhi State Archives as opposed to in the National Archives. This post by Rochelle Pinto discusses questions relating to the National Archives of India and other archival entities.

Though one approaches all state archives with apprehension about possible obstacles in the way of research, it would be a mistake to think that all have the same self-perception or anxieties as the Delhi-based National Archives of India. The NAI, one of the largest repositories of colonial and post-independence records, is overseen by the Ministry of Culture, but also, by default, by the Home Ministry. Since it is the repository of ‘non-current records’, the NAI becomes the recipient of de-classified documents and receives directives from time to time from the Home Ministry regarding restrictions to be placed on public viewing of documents.

This fact generates an over-hanging awareness of potential reprimands and memos that could issue from these Ministries, asking for explanations for why certain documents were released. A direct result of this is the pro-active censorship of materials such as maps of disputed territories or documents that ‘may incite communal disharmony’ by the archival staff themselves. One member of the staff, for instance, disallowed the reproduction of a map of the Tibetan region on the grounds that it would ‘jeopardise the geo-political interests of the country’, and recounts how he was responsible for withholding certain documents that were asked for in the Emergency period, that would have impacted the then office of the leader of the opposition, Charan Singh.

The NAI thus sees itself as closely wedded to the state and as a responsible guardian of potentially impactful documents that would have dire consequences in the wrong hands. No other state archive quite sees itself as the official concealer of the state’s dirty linen, and the Delhi archive, in that sense, is the apex institution in the degree to which it alone manifests emotions displayed typically by state archives across the country: secrecy, responsibility, control, paternalism, righteousness as the arbiter of access.

This is in direct contrast to the functioning and world view of many of the archivists, who in fact declare that the archives are technically open to all citizens, and are a public repository. This legal fact is predictably enough mediated through other legal qualifications about sensitivity and interests of the nation, and looped through a relay of permissions solicited from various authorities. A search for a conspiracy of concealment would draw a blank in most state archives. What works is a sort of relay of apprehensiveness and bureaucratic lag, with most staff looking over their shoulders to watch who sees them hand over any document from a list of publications available in their bookshop, to a list of documents acquired from the British Library through official exchange agreements. Save those who are higher up in the hierarchy and more secure in their positions, acquiring information could necessitate an RTI application purely to surmount the anxiety generated by informal questioning.

Archivists themselves are aware of this. They point to the fact that the maximum difficulty is encountered at the gate, where it can take a full half-hour or more to get past the security, get a daily pass issued, etc. Senior members of at least two prestigious archives in the capital pointed to the security guard’s authority at the gate as being the biggest hurdle to accessing the archives. Some point to the ‘caution exercised by the hatchet’ at the Ministry level, even before documents arrive in the public domain.

Pramod Mehra, the Assistant Director of the Archives indicates that little has changed since 1923 in the form of record-keeping, a consciousness brought in by the colonial government. The strife over public access can be recounted from the time of the colonial government with differing views exercised by changing governor-generals. The archives, he states, function as a mediator between the creating agency such as the Ministries, and scholars. But, he insists, all who carry bona fide documents proving their identity as citizens have an inalienable right to enter the archives.

Technically therefore, there seem to be sufficient spaces for intervention by users, and in fact, as the earlier post states, the increase in the number and kind of users has in itself forced an expansion in the categories of users permitted. It would appear that this is the trend everywhere. Where archival records accidentally have non-historical functions, as in the Delhi Archives, the archive alters eventually to accommodate users and it would seem that generating such users and uses is the easier way to pragmatise the question of access.

The other mechanism is to find hooks within the system through which to enable access. Take the case of the Central Secretariat Library which is housed within the Secretariat complex in New Delhi. The Library sees itself as a repository of government records and documents, open to government employees by right, for any research they may want to conduct. As a transition from the colonial period, this library stores official documents that pertain to the past of the current state. Since the library views itself as open to the public for generalised reading, there is not much anxiety over making older books and documents available. A student working on the North East, for instance, will find it cumbersome to enter the National Archives and to access maps of the region which may be far more easily traced in the Central Secretariat Library.

What is of even greater interest is that this is the library that holds any document acquired by a foreign entity in collaboration with a state institution. So, for instance, the online Digital South Asia Library, a consortium that is housed by the University of Chicago website, collected a range of literary works in Indian languages based on the compilations of a national librarian. A copy of this collection lies with the Central Secretariat, as do microfilms that have been received as part of an exchange programme with the British Library. The current director of this Library appears only too willing to encourage collaborations from historians towards the cataloguing of these collections, which once again are closed to the public merely because adequate cataloguing procedures are not in place. In an interview that appeared to open doors, he insisted that generating public pressure around the significance of the collection would work as a persuasive force, as evidence that the funds allocated for digitisation or preservation are in fact needed, and that an audience exists for such material.

It seems as though appealing to abstract principles of access, citizenship and rights calls forth nameless and immovable blocking mechanisms inbuilt in the state, whereas tinkering with minor functions that do not invoke its broader raison d’être allows one to enter unnoticed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-inalienable-right-to-the-archives-entering-the-capital

Archive and Access: The Delhi State Archives

aparna — 2011-08-23T04:43:39Z

In this, the fifth entry in a series on the CIS-RAW Archive and Access project, Aparna Balachandran reports on two state archives located in Delhi, the National Archives of India, and the Delhi Archives.

Less visible than the National Archives of India is Delhi’s other state archive, the Delhi Archives. Unlike the NAI, which is located in Janpath at the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, the Delhi Archives share a dilapidated building with the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management, in a corner of the Qutub Institutional Area. The Delhi Archives were set up in 1972 to house documents and other material pertaining to the city of Delhi from as early as 1785, consisting mainly of the records of the Delhi Resident, and post 1857, the Commissioners’ Office. The collection is certainly not vast, but includes gems like the Mutiny Papers, the 600 page document on the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, papers on the post-rebellion demolition of Chandi Chowk and records on the setting up of Imperial Delhi.

Like the NAI, the Delhi archives are presently suffering from a lack of both funds and staff; the library, for instance, is in a state of complete disrepair. But we were assured by Sanjay Garg, who is in charge of the research room, that the archive itself is in good functioning order. The process of cataloguing its scattered Persian and Urdu records is underway, as are efforts to digitise the entire collection, about which I shall presently say more. From the very beginning, one of the important mandates for the setting up of the Delhi Archives was the acquisition of material “of interest” to Delhi (although the grounds for adjudgement seem fairly unclear) from other archival collections. We were told that records are regularly acquired from the Haryana and Punjab State Archives, and from the NAI; in addition, when funds allow, a historian is dispatched to the British Library to decide on what should be acquired from there. The Acquisitions Department also sends out a call in the papers at intervals for information about personal and family collections; sadly, we could not glean more information about this process because the person in charge was away on vacation.

In 2006, the Delhi archives launched an ambitious and much heralded project to digitise its entire collection; the process was still underway in early 2009. Documents, maps and photographs are being scanned and the visitor can access these on the two or three computers that are available for the purpose. Unfortunately, the computers are equipped with a search engine that is both difficult and cumbersome to use as well as being excruciatingly slow. This technology was developed by and borrowed from the NAI, where the online index is so ridden with misleading spellings as to make it practically unusable. Our brief use of the search engine at the Delhi Archives did not seem to throw up any glaring mistakes here at least – or perhaps we were dazzled by the visual materials now available online. Maps, the earliest going back to 1803; photographs including those of nationalist leaders; landscapes, cityscapes and monuments shot by colonial photographers; and hilariously, photos of the archive staff posing in the library stacks and offices are now all there to view with a mere click of the mouse. For a hundred rupees apiece moreover, the user can go home with the images of her choice on a pen-drive or a CD.

It is notable that the users that the Delhi State Archives and the NAI get are extremely different, a fact that impacts the way the two places function, particularly in terms of access. We were told at the research room at the NAI that the variety of users it gets has increased both in numbers and in diversity, so much so that a few years ago, archive officials decided that the category of “bonafide” user had to be expanded to include the non-academic user. Previously, access to the NAI was largely restricted to scholars armed with documentation proving their credentials; now, any citizen with some form of state identification is allowed access. While the bulk of users are still most certainly academics, the archive, or the idea of the archive, looms large in the public imagination. There are for instance, many novelists and film-makers who use the NAI. Not all are happy with their experience; some leave disappointed because the dry colonial records do not reveal, or immediately reveal the stories and detail they seek. The launching of state schemes - like the extension of martyrs pensions - that require written evidence from the archive also triggers off an increase in users. As more people and events are defined as part of, and co-opted into the National Movement, claimants to familial connections soar. We were told for example, that there was an influx of enquirers from certain villages in Haryana after a few families were able to substantiate their claims of being descendents of INA soldiers. Last year, the government agreed to grant the status of freedom fighters to the victims of the Jalliawala Bagh massacre in 1919 resulting in the arrival of those claiming to be descendents seeking evidence for the same (a complicated situation because of the vast discrepancies between the reported numbers of those killed in the British and Indian lists).

Interestingly, one case had a direct impact on the archival policy on access to documents. In the 1990s, with the increase in the number of heritage hotels in areas that included the former Princely States, claimants to land soared, with the NAI and the Home Ministry being dragged to court in several cases. As a result, the Accession Papers of the Princely States were made unviewable (a mystery was thereby solved when I repeated this information to a historian friend, frustrated that she was not allowed access to Dewas records from the '50s for some unknown reason). Interestingly, the largest category of new users consist of descendents of indentured labourers who left India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to places like Mauritius, Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad and Fiji who want to trace their family histories. This is no easy task – these migrants appear in the lists that the colonial state kept of passages, medical examinations, births, deaths and marriages but were referred to by their first names only.

The profile of users at the Delhi Archives is quite different; most are non-academic and the number of scholars there could be as small as one or two a month. The non-academic user is also of a particular kind. Employees from various Delhi government departments are occasionally dispatched to the archive to refer to old files. But more importantly, the Delhi Archives are home to Delhi’s muncipal land records. A fifty to a hundred people a day arrive to look at, and make photo-copies of land records in order to settle disputes, make claims etc. The process is simple and routine and perhaps it is the fact of its being an everyday legal office that makes the Delhi Archives far simpler to access than a scholarly archive like the NAI. Entry to the NAI for instance, involves an arduous process of registration and verification; there is no such scrutiny at the Delhi Archives. Materials like border maps that are deemed as posing a threat to national security cannot be accessed at the NAI. Browsing through the maps at the Delhi Archives, we came across several border maps, a few of which we bought copies of that we can now presumably reproduce, disseminate or enlarge to hang on a wall.

We asked Sanjay Garg whether there was a policy at the Delhi to disallow the viewing of any of its records. Yes, he said, if the material was a threat to the nation’s safety. Had such a restriction ever been imposed? No, he answered.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-delhi-state-archives

Archive and Access: The Archive and the Indian Historian

aparna — 2011-08-23T04:44:44Z

This post is the second in a series by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto. It comes to the question of how we can extend some of the questions and concerns that have arisen around contemporary archives to the documentary archive. It argues that the conventional understanding of the print archive as a fragile, irreplaceable national cultural legacy is a limited one and tries instead to rethink questions of ownership and access, issues thrown up in sharp relief by the digital archive.

If we could eavesdrop on informal conversations between historians on their use of state-owned archives outside of metropolitan centres, we would probably chance upon a rich trove of stories. Many of these would have to do with the tragi-comic experience of accessing, finding and handling precious material that is sure to not survive the conditions in which it is stored. The uppermost thought and feeling when working in a small archive in India, therefore, is usually an anxiety about the mortality of the document.Yet, the conditions of preservation are scarcely the only concern when we approach the question of the archive here. In fact, without embedding the archive in the many questions surrounding it, it is unlikely that issues of preservation can be broached fruitfully.
Of late, a proliferation of questions and concerns around contemporary archives has foregrounded some of the assumptions underpinning print archives.* These could be seen as a development on the perspectives that have disrupted the sanctity of the historical document in itself. The place of the archive has been assailed from many quarters, whether from the Foucauldian suspicion of the logic of the archive, or from the critiques of history that point to the divide between history and memory, public and private, or, from the subaltern perspective, between history and other ways of experiencing time.

One strand of this critique that emphasises the constructed nature of the archive, as against viewing it as a precious and accidental trace, also emphasises the variety of users and uses that open archives enable.** Archives of the contemporary that allow users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data pose some challenging questions to more conventional approaches to archiving.

If we could typify a ‘conventional’ approach, it would be one that sees manuscript and paper archives as a source for researchers alone, or as a pedagogic appendage, or as a national legacy, held permanently in safekeeping away from those whose psyche it is supposed to buttress. For the historian-researcher, the view of the archive as a precious and irreplaceable trace from the past is an instinctive reaction to handling an ‘original’ document. It is that instinct that makes the question of whether or not the state can and should be a repository of the archive a tortuous one. If we revisit the print archive with questions emerging from contemporary archivists, it is still difficult to detach oneself from the compelling fragility of the document. Its potential transience in fact reinforces the idea of its accidental survival from a ‘different’ time and space, and the need to restrict its handling to a careful few. The historical document in an age of mechanical reproduction threatens to remove from the historianś grasp the experience of handling the original.Yet most historians would probably agree that as a generality, taking an average archive into consideration, the state’s role in preservation could until recently be summed up as exercising tight control over disappearing documents.

Most of the conceptual questions that are implicit in the critique posed by contemporary archivists are not new to historians. However, efforts to extend this to the material existence of the archive have not had the same success, and this is where there seems to be a gap between what contemporary and non-contemporary archivists are able to do. A very different picture is conjured up by the contemporary archive with the potential access it offers to non-specialist users. The uses and needs that emerge from non-specialists cannot be imagined in the context of the state archive. Often, though this is not usually made explicit, the imagination of the contemporary archive, dislodged from the sanctity of the national, pedagogic or academic ideal, implies a digital format and the increasing possibility for the user to recategorise and signpost different aspects of a collection.

While archives of the contemporary are not necessarily celebratory, and often indicate the differential access and rights of digital publics, they nonetheless do not address those areas that the conventional historian is most familiar with.*** All of these skirt around the relatively unreachable government archives, or privately held collections. The transition from print to digital format does not ensure that issues of state ownership, access and generating potential different users for archives will be addressed. In fact the Indian historian who is the bridge between the University and the state archive can only too easily imagine continuity across the transition to another technology.

On another note, the transition to digital technology and private ownership has actually presented the historian in India with a further quandary. The digital archive in a well-funded private university setting such as can be found in the US, or in a state institution as in the UK enables holding organizations to use digital technology to ‘complete’ their archival collections, drawing in private collections from countries that cannot afford preservation and enhancing their own closed holdings. While such institutions cannot have access to Indian state archives, it is an indication that technology alone does not resolve questions that require another sort of intervention.

The question at hand:
It may be well to set aside a nationalist perspective here, for it can be argued that those forbidden by the Indian government from accessing pertinent archives are well served by the fact that these exist elsewhere. The issue here is that while currently the archives continue to be housed and controlled by national institutions, we probably cannot retain this nationalist perspective to address the question of archives anymore. Aside from being positioned between two approaches: a rapid acquisition policy with respect to private holdings, and a relatively inaccessible state policy, we could also be seen as the (illegitimate?) repository of other national holdings. For instance, the Central Library in Goa at one point in time was the holding library for Portuguese empire in the ‘East’ or the Estado da Índia. It therefore has a large collection of official government publications from Africa. Communities disaffected from the nation see their archival holdings as illegitimately if safely housed in dominant regional libraries. Each area could possibly produce varying positions vis-à-vis the nationalist perspective and not just about illegitimacy of ownership. These will be rendered untenable if one sustains a singularly nationalist perspective on the archive What is at issue is that we currently have a restricted number of print archive models at hand. The most dominant are the stateist and the knowledge economy model.

The knowledge economy model seeks to make a single repository such as a well-funded University library the single largest holding of historical material; an asset into which other Universities can buy. As an instance, we could cite the South Asia projects of the University of Chicago, which, while it makes funds available to rescue private collections from disappearance, also has a centralizing vision that converts archival collections into a private asset.**** How do we, as historians of India (and perhaps necessarily Indian historians) situate ourselves with respect to these two models?

Quite simply, we, as an assorted group of users, don’t have the resources to buy private archives, and would be opposed to (in any case untenable) state control over these. As a first move, there is a need to shift from seeing ourselves in relation to the state archives alone, or as a relatively silent entity positioned between the state and the knowledge economy, dependent on individual research grants for access overseas archives.
We could instead consider the possibilities that technology holds out to enhance control, centralization and exclusivity, or to dissipate it. We could focus on questions of access; on who potential users are; on mutually recognized open access policies between institutions, and on finding interest groups and archive-related projects and other contexts for use of the archives.

A discussion on state and private collections may have to consider different approaches and collate different kinds of information to be able to intervene in defining the possibilities of archiving. Most fundamentally, these approaches would stem from considering who the current owners – economic, ethical, political – of these archives are, and who they could possibly be, what could take and what routes of dissemination they could have?A conceptualization of a notion of commons, or public good may be a beginning point to envisage who owns the archives, who cares for them, who uses them, and how.

*By contemporary archives we refer to those housed by SARAI in Delhi or the recently launched Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), an open access video archive that allows users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data.
**See for instance, Arjun Appadurai’s ‘Archive and Aspiration’
***See Lawrence Liang, ‘Global Commons, Public Space And Contemporary Ipr’
**** See the proposed Urdu Research Library Consortium into which members can buy shares.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-archive-and-the-indian-historian

Archive and Access: Documents in the Time of Democracy

rochelle — 2011-08-02T05:45:44Z

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts documenting Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijeet Bhattacharya's CIS-RAW project, Archive and Access. In this entry, Rochelle Pinto introduces a sub-set of posts that will look at the political significance of public access to official documents on the internet.

Contemporary conflict over land brings together issues of land ownership, legal documents and technology in ways that make us examine the circulation and political significance of documents and information. If we assess the relevance of documents as evidence or as verifiers of truth in the midst of political battles over land, we are led to doubt the apparently inherent democratic promise of digital technology. Even where internet technology is accessible, for instance in the modernised villages of Goa, our belief that public access to official documents through the internet is a democratic gesture can be questioned. It would appear that this form of circulation or display need not have great political significance for contemporary movements, let alone the question of whether it has the potential to function as a politically liberating force. This implies that while there is a fulfilment of democracy in a technical sense, the political significance of a particular document and of the public domain in which it circulates can only be gauged from the way in which a dispute over land or over ownership of property, or about membership within a village, foregrounds one kind of document over another and constructs different kinds of public. In the case of current disputes in Goa around land that is, or was held by village level communidades or gaunkarias, there is not even a stable or singular legal meaning attached to the range of documents that circulate among the competing authorities and parties to these disputes. In fact, tracing the life and path of the different legal documents that are necessary to argue a case involving communidade land involves a tangle of authorities, repositories and disputing groups. The sense of publicness that is raised by internet technology requires us to question the kind of politics that endows the document and its publicness with political meaning.

In a national and possibly international situation where anti-state claims on land are often non-legal (whether in the form of ethical arguments or armed rebellion) the current conflicts over land in Goa are local in the sense of having specific attributes. Special Economic Zones (as also other prior forms of transnational economic flows) propagate a delinking of life, labour, and capital from any fixed political entity, in as far as they claim immunity from national laws. Against this, the diverse claims on land in Goa (whether as familial disputes, environmental conflicts, livelihood arguments, belongingness and historical claims of being indigenous), raise overlapping claims and arguments about the relation between legality and politics, the use of internet technology within resistance movements and rights over land that are outside the domain of private property. All of these resonate with similar conflicts ongoing in other parts of the country, with some differences in the kinds of opposition generated.

The overall thrust of the argument made here is that movements that are pitted against the state or the multinational entities it supports straddle various forms of state power. Currently, we tend to see these divided into the formal exercise of power through law, regulation, and systematization, and the exercise of power through non-legal and non-state entities and means. The widely perceived illegitimacy of the state requires it to engage in two forms of political representation – the one consolidating its use of governmentality through law, the other effecting its sovereignty through a substantive exercise and demonstration of power. The appearance of legality and the lacing through of all political processes with due procedure and due documents is important to sustain some measure of governmentality, while the domain of substantive politics requires that rule be maintained through overt coercion and expropriation. The two domains are not disconnected. The ability to amend laws by an act of government, without due discussion or consensus gives the state infinite licence to bolster its acts of violence with legality. The gap between these two domains provides an element of unpredictability and turbulence that generates the frisson of excitement for viewers (as against the sufferers) of Indian state politics. For, the sheer existence of forms of governmentality implies that those equipped to do so will demand the fulfillment of the liberal project that the state claims to be bound by. The Right to Information movement and the innumerable human rights reports and people’s courts are instances of the state being called to order within its own terms. If these calls threaten to jeopardise interests beyond a certain threshold, then substantive violence is enacted, more often than not exceeding the bounds of legality. Those who oppose the state but whose opposition is articulated within the terms of governmentality find themselves condemned to demanding justice or the restitution of truth over decades. The success of the state however lies in its ability to negotiate both these forms of power, allowing it to insert itself into dominant global currents in politics and economy, while keeping its house in order at home. This gap and its bridging is made visible through a range of events, patterns and pronouncements. The unstable status of the document as the locus of truth and evidence, in the context of legal and political conflicts reveals this gap. Differing forms of punishment and justice are not the only markers of ill-fitting forms of power. Ethically admissible claims that are not based on rights, made by non-state entities that have no legal recognition are also caught on the side of all that lies outside the domain of modern statecraft. Internet technologies that work to make what was hitherto hidden or inaccessible more 'public' are necessarily inscribed within this network of quasi-legal, legitimate, illegal and illegitimate entities and practices.The working of technology then has to be understood through the idea of governmentality as a language of control and subversion. This is further qualified by the fact that the discourse around writing and regulation has always been viewed with suspicion by those who stand outside its circle of power.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/documents-in-the-time-of-democracy

Archive and Access: Digitisation and Private Records--The Case of the Regional Archive

sachia — 2011-08-23T04:32:07Z

This is the first in a series of posts by CIS-RAW researcher Aparna Balachandran on the Tamil Nadu Archives (TNA), looking at different aspects of their functioning in order to think about the issue of access in relation to regional archives in the country. More specifically, these posts will engage with the relationship of the TNA with the ways in which history is thought and written about in the Tamil region, both within the academy and outside. These posts are part of the CIS-RAW project 'Archive and Access'.

One of the less known functions of state archives in India is the periodic acquisition of records from the general public at regular intervals. These are in the form of voluntary contributions that are solicited through advertisements for particular kinds of private collections, depending on the nature of the archive and what its administrators think is a useful and appropriate addition to it. On our visit to the Delhi Archives we were explicitly informed that this was a place for collections or documents pertinent to the interests of the Delhi Archives, but the Delhi Archives were emphatically not interested in what was of 'national significance'. Materials of the latter kind, we were told, were to be given to the National Archives of India. Unfortunately since the person in charge of the acquisition of manuscripts was away, we were not be able to obtain more information about how contributions are determined to be of importance to the Delhi archive or not and the process by which they are obtained, or see a list of what in fact had been obtained in this way over the years.

The Delhi Archives appear to function quite autonomously as far as the acquisition of records of this kind is concerned; the TNA on the other hand works through one of the Regional Committees for the Survey of Historical Records. These Committees, whose members include the Assistant Commissioners and Collectors of District Record Offices in different parts of the country, are the decision makers as far as private records are concerned; a registry of these records is maintained at the National Archives. According to the Citizen’s Charter of the TNA, the Committee’s aim is to 'to survey and collect the rare records of historical administrative, legal and fiscal value in the hands of private persons to strengthen the history of India and to bring to light such records… to preserve them for posterity'. These records have to specifically pertain to the period before 1947; examples of contributions that would be welcome include 'palm leaves, copper plates, letters of high dignitaries, deeds, correspondence volumes, books, journals, etc., relating to the freedom movement, photos, any assignment of lands to the East India Company, or the British, religious customs, endowment of property to any charitable purpose, deed of Zamins, Polygars, Newabs, Samasthanams, Rajas, any notable events in the British Rule, etc'.

The acquisition of materials of this kind at the TNA ceased at least twenty years ago. The TNA does keep a list of these materials, and after some pleading, I was able to take a look at it (although the names of many of the contributors are now missing). They include for instance, the Pudukottai Residency records; various zamindari records including for instance, Sengampatti and Ramnad; Portuguese documents (Regimento Auditorio; Ecclesiastico de Archbispado Primacial de Goa Eda Sua Relocao Anno 1810); a collection of papers relating to the late Chief Minister and film actor MG Ramachandran (MGR); autographs and photos of nationalist leaders as well as sundry Hindi and Persian documents. The person in charge of these records explained that the criterion for accepting contributions was above all, their age. He mentioned the fact that many a contributor was turned away when they had collections pertaining to the post Independence period (the MGR papers being, of course, an exception to this rule). The issue of regional relevance that was emphasised in the Delhi Archives was not brought up here at all. It is interesting that after the linguistic re-organisation of South India, there was an attempt, following an assumed political and linguistic logic, to separate and distribute the holdings of the TNA to Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. This logic does not extend to the private holdings which are required to be of national rather than regional significance.

One problem that clearly surfaced in the course of my looking at the acquisition of private records by the TNA is the lack of any sort of formal legal arrangement between the families that possess collections and the institutions who wish to acquire them. This is particularly important because these collections often possess sentimental or other kinds of value for the families, which have to be acknowledged and respected even as they become part of public repository. The issue of digitisation also throws up various points. At a very basic level is the issue of conservation. While the TNA is digitising its holdings, private records are left untouched. It is unclear why this is the case; in all likelihood, it is because they are not considered a part of the TNA’s holdings. The archive is merely their guardian (this for instance is also true of land records which do not fall under the digitisation scheme because the TNA is merely “housing” these documents for the government). Given the eclectic nature and often geographically and linguistically diverse range of the private records at the TNA (and other regional archives), there is no doubt that users of archives would benefit greatly from online catalogues of these collections. And finally, while the official British themselves occupy little space in the public imagination of Madras, the range of private records the TNA possesses might well attract new users, both scholarly and lay, to the colonial archive.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/tamil-nadu-archives

Applications to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment under the Right to Information Act

nirmita — 2011-08-17T08:50:22Z

The Centre for Internet and Society filed two applications to the MSJE under the Right to Information Act seeking certain information relating to the implementation of the National Policy for Electronic Accessibility and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

In January 2009, The Centre for Internet and Society filed two separate Right to Information (RTI) applications with the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MSJE), New Delhi. The first application was addressed to Shri K. S. Sawhney, Director, MSJE, seeking information on

The utilization of 3% funds of each department of the Central Government towards welfare of disabled persons, as specified under the eleventh five year plan from January 2008
The detailed rules and guidelines and the monitoring mechanisms set up under each ministry as per this plan
Other RTI applications which had been previously filed in this regard

The second application was also to the MSJE enquiring about measures taken to ensure that government web sites were made accessible to persons with disabilities. Information was requested regarding

The nature and outcome of surveys on government web sites for checking accessibility
The criteria used for measuring accessibility
Details of the circulars issued to different departments and ministries in this regard.

With regard to the first application, MSJE responded broadly that information pertaining to the allocation of funds should be obtained from the concerned ministries/departments, the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance directly and not from them. The Ministry mentioned that the process of formulating guidelines was still underway and that the Chief Commissioner of Persons with Disabilities (CCPD), the Central and State Governments were empowered to monitor the progress of the same. The Ministry was silent on the enquiry about previous RTI applications filed in relation to the above matter by other persons.

In response to the second application the Ministry wrote that communication regarding the provisions of the UNCRPD had been circulated to all Ministries for implementation. The Ministry also admitted that no efforts had been made in this direction and since the CCPD was the body which was responsible for checking the accessibility of some government web sites, the application from CIS had been forwarded to CCPD for relevant action.

To read the application on allotment of funds, click here; to read the department's response, click here.

To read the application on steps taken to ensure accessibility of government websites, click here; to read the department's response, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/rti-applications-to-the-ministry-of-social-justice-and-empowerment

35th SCCR: CIS Statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives

sinha — 2017-11-15T13:35:02Z

Anubha Sinha, attending the 35th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 13 November, 2017 to 18 November, 2017, made this statement on the agenda for Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives on behalf of CIS on Day 3, 15 November, 2017.

The Centre for Internet and Society, in agreement among others, believes that an international binding instrument to govern exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives is critical.

In several countries, their set of limitations and exceptions do not serve all intended beneficiaries in a comparably equal manner. For example, for the work of archives in India, there is very little that allows such institutions to do in terms of making copies for preservation and noncommercial dissemination. India, like many other countries here has a rich cultural heritage – and doing any activities with old audiovisual material involves identifying rightholders and clearing rights connected to orphan works and traditional cultural expressions as well. Imagine the onerous task of an archive of clearing all these rights in connection with appropriate agencies, and of course clearing additional permissions from authors and performers. In our research, we discovered that most archives in India miserably fail on this front, causing valuable material being locked in storage rooms for decades.

Needless to say, accessibility to this national wealth of knowledge in archives also supports the mission of libraries, museums and educational institutions and researchers.

So Mr. Chair, we strongly believe that an update to the international copyright system via a binding instrument would serve many countries well. It would empower all countries to fill in such deficiencies in relation to libraries, archives, educational and research institutions, museums and persons with disabilities.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/35th-sccr-cis-statement-on-limitations-and-exceptions-for-libraries-and-archives