In the days to come, with just a click of the mouse one can have a glimpse of lakhs of India’s rich cultural treasures, including artefacts and antiquity, kept in the 52 Government-run museums across the country.
These were never on display and the new initiative would make India the first country in the world to adopt such a nationwide system wherein rich cultural treasures that are currently inaccessible to be available to the public through a searchable and centralised database. In the first phase, by the year-end, the treasure trove kept in the country’s 10 major national museums will be available online through a website, said a senior official from the Union Culture Ministry.
The official said that the digitisation, which is being done by ‘Jatan’ software by Pune-based Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C DAC), includes archiving the location to which the artefact belongs, its date and age, nature, measurements and detailed visual description. Jatan, a virtual museum builder software, is basically a digital collection management system specially designed for museums.
The official said that currently, the software is operating in house in major museums — including Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad where around data of 50,000 antiquities have been compiled, Prince of Wales of Museum in Mumbai, Pune-based Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum, Delhi-based National Museum, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum, Mumbai and Victoria Memorial Museum, Kolkata.
On an average just 8 per cent to 9 per cent of total artifacts in any museum in any given time are displayed for public because of shortage of space and staff. The proposed website, however, would enable the artifacts lovers or research scholars to have virtual access to the of entire collections. The official said that within next three years, the balance 42 museums situated across the country will also be networked to the website enabling the user to have a dekko at the treasure trove.
For the training in preservation and conservation of artifacts and for improvement and upgradation of museums, the Culture Ministry has signed a programme called Vivekananda Memorial Programme for Museum Excellence with the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, the official added.
