Sikh Digital Heritage Library – Nanakshahi Trust, SikhRI and PDL

The issue of the loss of Sikh heritage sites and documents has long been lamented by many Sikhs.  In fact, one of my fellow langa(w)riters blogged about the need to ‘preserve what history we have left.’  One group has been silently seeking to remedy this problem – the Nanakshahi Trust.

Quietly working on a massive project for over the past 6 years, the Nanakshahi Trust, along with the Sikh Research Institute, have inaugurated the Panjabi Digital Library:

For the first time ever a searchable collection of millions of rare pages on the Sikhs and the region of Panjab has been made available. Panjab Digital Library (PDL) will include texts of manuscripts, books, magazines, newspapers and photographs and will be available to anyone with Internet access at www.PanjabDigiLib.org. This launch was made possible in part by The Nanakshahi Trust and the Sikh Research Institute (SikhRI).

In today’s society, digitization is the key to immortality.  While Sikhs have to be equally wary of those that claim Sikhs have no history as well as those that come up with their own ludicrous interpretations, a project such as the Panjab Digital Library allows Sikhs to access their own primary and secondary sources.  Nanakshahi Trust has done a tremendous boon to Sikhs, researchers, and all that are interested in the preservation of history and man (and woman’s) historical past.

So far the work completed has been phenomenal:

To date, PDL has been instrumental in digitally preserving over 2.5 million folios from 3,400 manuscripts, 2,200 books, 1,990 issues of periodicals, 5,578 issues of newspapers, 3,152 photographs, 248,000 legal documents and some 168 hours of video recordings.  The current collection of data amounts to about 15,000 GB of available information.

However, growth is still very much in the future:

According to Davinder Pal Singh, PDL’s co-founder and executive director, “PDL will break many barriers which currently restrict a conventional library. Information is decentralized, through its shared storage and access model, thus enabling utilization of a single resource concurrently by multiple users all over the world. On a local note, assuming that every household will possibly have a computer within the next ten years, PDL holds great promises for the people of Panjab especially.”

I ask, or rather implore, Sikhs in the cybersangat to advance the amazing seva of this team.  Adopt-a-book, sponsor the digitization of a 19th century illuminated Janamsakhi, Punjabiyat-lovers can sponsor the digitization of an 18th century Heer-Ranjha manuscript, all are possible!

Contribute to the general fund of the Nanakshahi Trust and explore the site and our heritage!