Education push: Scottish Church College collaborates to digitise philosophy books

Kolkata: Scottish Church College has collaborated with Bhaktivedanta Research Centre, which will be helping in the digitization of Philosophy books in the college library for developing an online archive.

The Principal of the College Madhumanjari Mandal said that the research centre will be provided with a scanner and an individual who will be helping the existing digitization committee of the college, amongst other necessary help. “It is an expensive project but is needed considering our college is very old and has many rare and old documents which are now becoming brittle,” the principal said.

Initially known as the General Assembly’s Institution, it was founded on July 13, 1830. The college founder, Rev. Alexander Duff, was the first missionary to India from the Church of Scotland. The College is the second oldest in North Calcutta.

The college had formed a 10-member committee to digitise the old and rare books. Vice-Principal Dr Supratim Das, who is also a historian, is also part of the committee. Librarian Manasi Guha is the convener and the committee includes Geeta Dubey of Hindi department, Varbi Roy of Philosophy, Riddhi Bhattacharya of History, Joydip Mitra of Physics, Satabdi Ghosh of Botany, Semanti Mukherjee of Psychology and Assistant Librarian Totan Maity.

“We had aimed to digitise 8 lakh pages, out of which more than 3.5 lakh had been done. We started with digitising minutes of Alexander Duff in 1831 and volumes of college magazines which started in 1910,” Das said.

This committee has been working towards the digitisation of ancient texts, books, college magazines, and prospectus, amongst others. Pages which have become brittle and old, and may not be digitised later are being given priority by the committee.

There are heavy old books with 2,000 pages and the committee is taking time with those as they are trying to cause minimal damage to these books in the process of digitization. “It may take the next three months to complete the digitization process. We want to preserve them and make them accessible to global readership step by step,” the official said.

In December last year, the Presidency College Digital Archive was inaugurated. The archive included government proceedings, periodicals, memoirs, autobiographies, college magazines, seminar society records, and student miscellanies, amongst other records for over two hundred years.