Baroness Tessa Blackstone, the chairman of the British Library, is in Calcutta to speak with various stakeholders in a massive British Library project to digitise its collections of South-Asian language printed books dating from 1714 to 1914.
Digitisation will not only preserve the rare and priceless — and often brittle — books for posterity but also make them available to people across the world, transforming the scope of research in these languages.
Titled Two Centuries of Indian Print, the project is expected to encompass 22 South Asian languages and some 11 million pages.
The first phase involves the British Library’s collection of early printed Bengali books as well as the cataloguing of these resources, for which the library is collaborating with the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, National Library of India, the National Mission on Libraries and other institutions in India as well as the library of SOAS, University of London.
On Thursday, the 73-year-old Baroness visited Jadavpur University and met with the university registrar and some senior professors to discuss how this project would take shape and move forward.
“This was an official meeting regarding the pilot project for Two Centuries of Indian Print that we have been talking to the British Library about. Among other things the baroness spoke about the importance of digitisation as well as funding avenues in future,” said Abhijit Gupta, an associate professor at Jadavpur University, who is one of the co-investigators in the project.
On Friday, Baroness Blackwell will meet with Arun Kumar Chakraborty, the director-general of the National Library to discuss digitisation and collaboration between the national libraries of the UK and India.
Name: Tessa Blackstone
Title : The Rt Hon. the Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington
Politics: Labour MP, House of Lords. Former minister for education (1997-2001) and former minister for the arts (2001-2003)
Current posts: Chair, British Library board, and chair, Great Ormond Street Hospital Trust, among others
Former posts: Vice-chancellor of Greenwich University, Master at Birkbeck College and lecturer at London School of Economics, among others
Family: The baroness was born in 1942. According to The Guardian, “her father was the chief fire officer for Hertfordshire, her mother an actress and model for the House of Worth in Paris.” House of Worth is a French house of high fashion that specialised in haute couture and perfumes
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Front Page> Calcutta> Story / by Staff Reporter / Friday – March 25th, 2016