PHD Library Discussion Forum

PHD Library Discussion Forum

1. Manuscript 


2. Books


3. Magazines


4. Newspapers


5. Photographs


6. Pamphlets

Preservation

Preservation

Time is a great leveler. With the passage of time, objects, animate or inanimate, tend to decay and perish. But certain things need to be preserved and conserved for all they represent historically and all they have to continue to teach us in the future. It is through the human effort of preservation that frontiers of human knowledge and human civilizations have been extended. In an eternal race of human memory against time, it is through the endeavor of preservation and perpetuation of achievements that the continuity of human civilizations has been maintained.  Thus, the successful preservation of history is the bedrock of current human information, knowledge and civilization. Without this attention and effort, elements of nature such as heat, light, humidity and natural decay, natural calamities such as earthquakes and floods, and manmade disasters such as wars and acts of vengeance and vandalism will, singly or jointly, wipe out irreplaceable foundations of the past. Establishment of archives, museums, libraries and the latest technique of digitization are some of the prevalent preservation techniques employed today.

Digitization

Digitization

Digital preservation is the most viable and the only major technological alternative available to us for safe guarding our fast diminishing heritage. In order to contribute to any preservation effort and bring about a positive change, technological advances have to be met with equal amount of concern, enthusiasm, will to take concrete steps and initiative in the right direction.

PDL from its very inception has been at the helm of preservation effort, aimed as saving our heritage and salvaging position of Sikhs and Panjabis as a cultural identity. Providing digitization services to individuals and institutions since 2003, it has been instrumental in digitally archiving thousand of originals of manuscripts, rare books and other literature thus far.

PDL provides digitization services both on site and off site, depending on the constraints. If the material to be digitized warrants special care and cannot be transported to the PDL offices due some reasons, then PDL provides its digitization services right at the place where the material is situated. In such cases, the equipment and the staff is temporarily moved to the close vicinity of the place to carry out the project.

If the material is good enough to be transported and/or the custodian is willing to send it to the PDL offices, it is carried out at the PDL official center itself. The quality of the digitized output does not change in either of the cases, but due to the benefit of complete infrastructure being available, projects tend to finish in a shorter time span when carried at the PDL offices, thus also reducing the overall project cost.

Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes

If you have ever wondered what lies behind the huge work related to the digital libraries in general, and Panjab Digital Library in particular, now is your chance to find out...

Thousands of documents are published every week in our library so it's quite a skill to choose those that are of utmost historical and aesthetic importance and that will be most useful for our readers.

Looking at this complex and busy operation, you might think we have a staff of hundreds to deal with. In fact we have a staff of only 21, including the editorial and digitization team, data entry operators, IT specialists, managers and administrative staff. This has been made possible because of the dedication of our staff and a small army of wonderful volunteers - currently 10 of them - who put in hours of work helping to run our service.