Welcome to the 2 Centuries of Indian Print SOAS blog!
SOAS Library in partnership with the British Library is proud to be working on the Two Centuries of Indian Print project.
Money has been received from the Newton Fund (which uses science and innovation partnerships to promote economic development and social welfare) to digitise unique material from our South Asian printed books collection. The project will digitise 4,000 early printed Bengali books as part of the British Library’s collection, amounting to more than 800,000 pages. While SOAS Library will have 50 of its unique Bengali titles digitised between the period 1801-1861.
The Bengali language material at SOAS Library is one of the oldest and richest collections, consisting of about 6000 titles from the earliest periods to current day. Several hundreds of these pre date 1900. The library also holds one of the largest collections devoted to works by and about the Bengali writer/poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Material includes rare books such as Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s, A Grammar of the Bengali Language (1778), translations of the Mahabharat (1865), the Bible-The New Testament in Bengali: translated from the Greek (1833) and a Bengali translation of the Puranas Bhagavata-purana originally in Sanskrit (1830).
This pilot project is also partnered up with the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR) of Jadavpur University, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, working with the National Library of India, the National Mission on Libraries, and other institutions in India.
In addition to this Digital workshops have taken place in Kolkata (2016 and 2017) among Library, cultural and heritage scholars to reflect on how Information technology is shaping digital humanities.
The pilot has been running from April 2016 and will continue up to April 2018, we hope to extend the project to other languages in further phases.
– See more at: http://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print