Common Archival Resource Centre
ASIA’S DEEP HISTORIES, SHARED FUTURES: CREATING ENDURING NETWORKS OF LEARNING
About Common Archival Resource Centre
Common Archival Resource Centre (CARC), Nalanda University is a digital archive set up with the concurrence of the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. The idea of the centre was envisaged in the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC) summit in 2015. The Centre preserves and shares Asia-related information and resources that highlight its history, material culture, trade networks, heritage, religious ideas & practices, oral & performative traditions, civilization, and Asian networks of interaction. The centre is designing and offering academic opportunities for continued exploration of these fields. Promotion of regional peace and vision being one of the foundational objectives of the University, the Centre attempts to curate digital collections from across Asia, particularly Southeast Asia relating to the rich cultural traditions, heritage, history and civilizational exchange. It aims to enhance the understanding of past cultural connectivity and exchange as well as share that understanding globally. The Centre offers a portal to form clusters, which cater to the digital conditions of production, circulation, consumption, appropriation, storage, and re-usage of various forms of knowledge in Asia.
Objective
Multifarious cultural resources on the digital platform create a knowledge network, catering to both the dimensions of the knowledge map: the structure of knowledge (classification and codification of the material articulations of knowledge) and the diffusion of knowledge (modes of expression and the question of access). The Digital Archive offers content in different formats like images, texts, audio, video, etc. Resources are defined by their primary nature like manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, oral history, maps, archaeological findings, religious practices, visual and performing arts and several other forms. The centre will allow archivists to gather, describe, manage and preserve the digital components in the archive while maintaining their relationship with more traditional components of the same. It is designed for visitors to access low-resolution formats. Users of all ranges can find the collections useful for academic research, reference work, reading and consultation for non-commercial purposes. CARC facilitates digitization and dissemination of knowledge in a technology-enabled environment with descriptions for each collected and curated object for all the range of users. As the nature of knowledge is interdisciplinary specifically the cultural aspects are diversified and challenging to fit under a common resource centre, we welcome the challenge and are bound to develop a knowledge-friendly environment for researchers and the future generation.
Scope
The Centre will primarily carry out the task of creating high quality and trusted sources of Asia related digitized knowledge available to the users, share appropriate findings with policy-makers and stakeholders including recommendations for certain courses of action. The Centre engages with institutions through a mode of collaboration to create and share knowledge. The Centre also welcomes private collectors, individuals with unpublished histories of their material and memorial possessions, institutions, organizations, and small houses who lack the infrastructure to save their treasures. The Centre is also creating a Digital Laboratory to preserve and disseminate these treasures.
CONTACT
CARC NU <[email protected]>
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