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The Lost Archive — the Digital Library of India

VLADIMIR:Well? What do we do?
ESTRAGON: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.
VLADIMIR:Let’s wait and see what he says.
ESTRAGON:Who?
VLADIMIR:Godot.
— — — — — — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
In May, I was confronted with the image at the top of this essay when I went to the DLI website. It has since been replaced by the image below that. Both tell visitors the same thing: the Digital Library of India has closed its digital doors.
This is a problem. You see, like many researchers I was elated to find a ton of published material online when I first came across DLI. Over the summer as I looked at my notes and files, I realized that I have about 7000 items — notes, screenshots, and PDF files — related to stuff I read or browsed through while on the DLI website. 7000! Seven thousand! If you don’t believe me, here’s what my computer tells me. Yes, I know the image says 8366 files in 1966 folders, but not all the files are DLI.

Even if I transcribe my notes for one book every week, I’ll barely scratch the surface of the material I’ve gathered over the years.
When life gives you a Lost Archive, you tap into your inner Assassin’s Creed and create an Assassin’s classroom, so to speak. I’ve decided that until DLI returns, I’ll post my notes here. I intend once-a-week postings (except on vacations and/or long weekends). The tag DLI and subject tags like India or Religion or War, etc., should make it easier for readers to navigate.
My purpose is to contribute to public history. It’s no use letting all my notes gather digital dust on a flash drive. What’s the point of that? Far better to put the material out there for the sake of public history education.Who knows, maybe some researcher looking for a preview of some book I read on DLI might find my notes and summaries useful. Or some bored reader may find my notes on such esoteric subjects as Messrs. Leistler of Vienna at the 1851 Great Exhibition of interest. It’s an educational way to spend 5–6 minutes while you’re commuting. A way to relive the memories of your ancestors without damaging yourself.
There is also another lesson here, a serious one for those of us interested in digital humanities. The Digital Library of India going offline is a reminder of the fragility of digital archives. Since DLI was created by the Government of India I didn’t really pay attention to the copyright details since I assumed (naively) that a government project would have taken care of all the necessary permissions before uploading documents. In any case, I was looking for books published before 1923, so copyright was not an issue for me. I did stop and stare at some recent works too but those are easily available to me here in the US. I didn’t want to download thousands of PDF files so I took extensive notes, some screenshots of interesting passages, and downloaded only the books that I wanted to read later. If I had known then how ephemeral digital archives of the DLI type are, I would have downloaded thousands of files while they were still available. For now even my copyright-free material is gone, and God knows when it will return. If ever. I should have known that an Indian government that is unable to process my digital identity card despite multiple emails would not have done its copyright homework either.
It was quite clear, moreover, that the poorly-paid interns or clerks who entered the data at DLI had little interest in their scanning job or any real love of books. Burra sahib had ordered that books were to be scanned and so hundreds of interns processed hundreds of pages, their minds a pleasant blank, all waiting for 5:00 PM. Don’t blame them. If the Big Boss didn’t communicate the enormous pioneering contribution to research that DLI represented, why would there be anything other than indifference and sloppiness at the level of the working stiff?
But, on the flip side I did stumble upon old books in Bengali, Hindi, English, and even French, some published in the 1850s, others in the early 1900s. There was stuff about Bengali village life in the late nineteenth century, memoirs by imperial koi-hais, a 1922 text by the Begum of Bhopal on the necessity of purdah (you can learn more about the Bhopal begums at Professor Frances Pritchett’s website at Columbia University), and a whole range of other books that my grasshopper mind jumped to out of curiosity.
Serendipitous finds on DLI abounded and the process was actually an annoyance when I was in the thick of things. The website was quirky, the interface clunky, and the whole thing awkwardly-constructed. Keyword searches often landed you in areas quite remote from your original query. Pages of books were sometimes scanned backwards, so I could never really recommend the website as a resource tool for students. Spelling errors in the DLI catalog were monstrously creative (why, oh why, didn’t I take screen shots?!), and sometimes the files and the titles didn’t match at all.
The DLI does have a spiffier and more copyright-compliant cousin, the National Digital Library of India , but the entirety of the old DLI collection isn’t there and you have to create an account to get access to the World Library collection. Ms. Sujata Roy, the COO of the NDL, is very competent, responsive and very helpful. She is aware of the shortcomings of some of the scanning centers and is working on bringing all of them up to speed. Some, but not all, of the DLI collection is also available at archive.org although I understand that archive.org is blocked by the Indian government, due to copyright violation complaints by Indian filmmakers. While the DLI powers-that-be figure out how to sift millions of pages of copyrighted material from copyright-free material, they and you and I all know the process will take at least a few months, if not more.
So, while we wait for Godo…er, DLI, I’ll dip into my lost archives and tell you about books I’ve read, places I’ve been to, people I’ve met in 1853 or 1914 or 1922. And this endeavor will take me a few years at least. Hopefully, Medium won’t pull a DLI on me during that time. Oh, and those references to Assassin’s Creed? I’m not a gamer but when I decided to call this post “The Lost Archive”, a quick google search told me that it’s a title of an Assassin’s Creed game. That’s all. Stepping back in time with me and DLI involves no risk to you at all and offers the opportunity to continue the conversation via comments.
