Roadblocks to Openness and Digitisation: Campaigns to digitally preserve treasures in the tiny home of the first printing press in Asia: Successes, part-successes, failures

Frederick Noronha

Goa, in South Asia, had a very early encounter with printing, as early as the middle of the 16th century, as the city has been a place of crossroads and commercial and cultural exchange between Europe and Asia. In addition, Goa’s location has allowed the accumulation of heritage collections whose interest reflects the city’s importance. However, digitisation campaigns and providing access to these treasures have encountered challenges despite these elements. This case study examines these challenges and the local initiatives, such as the reluctance and apprehension to accept open GLAM principles.

Why would heritage institutions benefit from digitising their collections and providing access to those not or no longer protected by copyright? The benefits of access to their collections would bring to light the incredible, diverse and often unnoticed heritage of this small but complex region.

Providing greater visibility and ease of discovery on these collections related to Goa, India, and even international relations with other countries related to colonisation can promote materials and foster research on these themes. Furthermore, the ease of access can help overcome language barriers (as Goa-related material has been written in many Indian and some European languages, mainly Portuguese), although many challenges would need to be overcome to make this work adequately.

Strengths and attainments: the background

Goa was the first centre of encounter between Europe and Asia — in architecture, European literary forms embodied in an Asian language, and music. It was home to the first Gutenberg-style press in Asia in 1556. Early works printed in Goa focused on plants, multiple languages, maps, and Asia’s geography, apart from religion.

These works are currently copyright-expired. Yet, moves to digitise collections have been slow and painstaking despite the calls from researchers to provide access to these collections. Indeed, Dr Newman Fernandes, former principal of the St Xavier’s College in Goa, a prominent educationist whose library sciences background helped him understand the importance of old texts, suggested a plan to publish manuscripts as well as re-editions of the printed works of Jesuit missionaries who studied the Konkani and Marathi languages in the 16 and 17th centuries in Goa, such as the « Collections Racholensis », a collection of work and texts produced from the 16th century pioneering knowledge-printing hub of Rachol.

Other researchers, such as the late Fernandes, who has been working on Goa issues since the 1960s, have sought to republish the literature produced by the Franciscan friars of Bardez and the “numerous Konkani documents in Halakannada script such as the manuscripts preserved in the Partagali Math, a Hindu religious centre. However, this project is not yet implemented due to a lack of local interest, technical and financial support.

PHOTO ABOVE: From The Goan Cook’s Guide, by Pedro Damião Dias, 1914, published amidst the expatriate Goan community in Bombay.

These collections are critical for researchers who would like to use them for their academic work. These academics must find ways to publish these works on their own to make them known to the general public. While researchers and academics struggle to access heritage materials, cultural heritage institutions should move forward responding to their users’ needs by digitising collections and making them available to all citizens, and ensure that everyone can access and exercise their right to culture, to research and to education.

DIGITISATION EXPERIENCES

Yet, initiatives have been taken in institutions like the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (XCHR) library, Porvorim. It digitised some 60,600 documents of the local Mhamai Kamat trading house in the colonial 17th century; old and rare newspapers.

Goa’s main Krishnadas Shama State Central Library, says it has scanned around 300,000 pages — official gazette, old and rare Portuguese and local language newspapers. Many more collections await being digitised as the institution faces difficulties in continuing this work. Library sources point to a shortage of suitable teams, sufficient scanners, public domain tools and licensing knowledge, software, proper prioritisation, methods for speedy retrieval, and storage hardware that doesn’t turn obsolete fast.

Despite efforts from a few institutions, there are multifactorial challenges that prevent scaling up these campaigns and providing access to these materials.

Apprehensions and limits encountered in digitisation

One of the critical challenges is a global apprehension of digitization as successful digitization campaigns depend on the vision and mindset of government employees. Currently, outputs of digitization initiatives are often not shared online or otherwise made publicly available.

Leonard Fernandes of the indie publishing firm CinnamonTeal who partnered with Dr Ananya Chakravarti, a grant recipient under the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library London, has commented in a blog post:

“A few organisations were apprehensive about where the digitised images would be stored and who might be able to access them. Libraries that are sensitive to the relative advantage they can command on account of possessions that are rare, sometimes see digitization as a threat to this advantage. They tend to reject such proposals outright or allow some less sensitive material to be digitised. It took some convincing to assure these organisations that the images would be secure and would not be exploited commercially. On the other hand, others were only too happy to allow digitization as it ensured that they would obtain a copy of the digital images.”

This quote shows the two main positions of the institutions. On the one hand, the institutions that are afraid of a commercial reuse of their collections and on the other hand, those that see the advantage of getting help to digitise their collections and have a digital copy of them.

Further than this, additional roadblocks to the open GLAM approach have been identified, such as:

• Lack of prioritisation locally: Both State and GLAM institutions have insufficiently prioritised the need for digitisation and ensuring age-old resources are publicly available.

• Lack of a local campaign over local resources: Given India’s sub-continental size, it can be challenging to coordinate centralised national-level campaigns to impact all regions. Crowdsourcing could help here.

• Insufficient successful local role models: This makes it challenging to convince others to enter open access practices in GLAM.

• Linguistic barriers due to language use shifts: Goa has often seen its dominant languages shift. From Goy-Kannadi to Modi, Portuguese to Roman-script Konkani, English, Marathi, and Devanagari-script Konkani. Erosion of skills in earlier dominant languages makes accessing old, copyright-expired texts challenging.

• Delayed access to online technologies: The access to the internet and cyberspaces has grown only recently.

• Lack of online storage resources: South Asia has limited online storage spaces of its own for content. Much material has been stored on international sites such as Internet Archive, Flickr, Indic-language wikipedias and the English wikipedia.

• Lack of knowledge around digitising: Technical issues can also be a stumbling block, with limited skills in this field.

• Lack of importance to written or digitised texts: Traditionally, oral societies need oral archiving and CC Open Oral GLAM initiatives are prioritised in South Asia.

• Limited understanding of open licensing and public domain tools: Sufficient scale is yet to be built to have an impact.

• Lack of local language familiarity: Tech-savvy youngsters lack language skills, while language-knowing elders have limited tech skills.

• Low awareness among like-minded groups: Potential allies (not-for-profits, governments, religious institutions) also follow the ‘copyright’ approach by default.

• Dominant State discourse: This generally supports the copyrighted, all-rights-reserved model.

• Lack of financial resources: Talent-rich, resource-poor South Asia lacks the resources needed to build up Open GLAM initiatives. Yet, depending on foreign funding might not make for a sustainable approach. Human resources are also inadequate.

• Reluctance to share collections digitally: For instance, at least two private collectors of rare Roman-script Konkani works have expressed unwillingness to digitise and share them.

• Lack of a Goa (or India) specific search engine for open GLAM resources, such as Openverse.

In the above list, we see several significant elements around the vision and mindset of the institution, technical and material resources and skills, and apprehensions about the reuse of content, especially for commercial purposes. These elements create limits to developing an open and accessible approach to collections in cultural institutions.

Goa’s collections at risks

The urgency of the situation is obvious as the world’s climate changes rapidly and leaves us facing floods, fires, conflicts, and neglect. Digitization can ensure that collections do not disappear forever and that GLAM institutions are able to pass these collections on to the next generations.

Henry Scholberg, Former Director, Ames Library of South Asia, University of Minnesota notes in Journalism in Portuguese India that Goa published over 300 journals and periodicals in 140 years but “many of these periodicals are dying a slow death in the Central Library in Panjim, due to the humid climate of monsoonal India. Many are utterly lost and their existence is known only because their titles appear on someone’s list.”

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums in Goa could benefit significantly from open GLAM approaches to ensure the preservation and the sharing of these collections. Through the sharing of the culture they represent, GLAM institutions would share the history of Goa with other countries, and foster research and study of these collections.

Other open access initiatives implemented in the same area

However, some open access initiatives have worked in some cases. They contribute positively to education, research, language studies and general access to knowledge about the Goa region.

There is potential in sharing work in the area of CC. For instance, re-publishing useful texts whose copyright has expired encouraging authors to consider CC for their work on collections will ensure a better collections outreach.

Additional open access activities have been implemented in this area such as:

• The Goa University added online its Konkani Encylopedia in Konkani Vishwakosh in 2013. More work is needed to improve its accessibility. Nevertheless, it acts as a source for the creation of new information.
• The Dantas-D’Souza Modern English-Konkani Dictionary. Shared online on Wikicommons and under a CC licence.

These initiatives help to preserve and share of knowledge around the Konkani language although the search facilities need to be improved.

• Copyright-expired texts: Online initiatives like archives.org are making many Goa-related books from global sources available. Contributions from projects like the Million Books Project have helped make accessible large numbers of Goa-related copyright-expired books online.

• Promoting CC option for authors: This option has been used but only in a minimal number of cases. A few authors (Valmiki Faleiro, Swedish students of the Royal Institute of Art in Sweden, who authored Goa: Found and Imagined.

• Reviving copyright-expired work: Romans is a Konkani term for a novella, potboiler or fictional work. Prominent Konkani authors like Caridade Damaciano Fernandes are out of copyright, and their work awaits being brought back into circulation.

CONCLUSION

Although many collections of cultural heritage institutions in Goa are in the public domain as the copyright has expired, many of them are not openly accessible. This state of fact is due to many institutions facing difficulties fulfilling their missions to digitise and preserve their collections digitally and provide access to their various users.

These challenges are primarily due to a lack of financial, material and technical resources and the necessary skills around public domain licences and tools.

The general lack of resources coupled with the lack of political commitment at the local and national level and the lack of model institutions are essential elements to highlight the central role of cultural heritage institutions and ensure they move forward on the road to open access to collections.

In the face of climate change, human neglect, but above all at the risk of forgetting our history, the lack of digitisation could lead to an irreversible loss of Goa’s collections. This loss of heritage and the loss of collections describing and retracing history would be a definite alteration in understanding Goa’s past.

The open GLAM approach offers many benefits to cultural heritage institutions, starting with outreach locally, nationally and internationally. Online availability would provide access and the possibility of re-using the collections by interested people worldwide, including students, researchers, academics, creators, and the general public. In addition, these collections, information now held by cultural heritage institutions, could enhance the city of Goa and its region, highlighting links with former Portuguese colonies, its diaspora and other historical centres near and far over the centuries.

This outreach could also impact the tourism economy as Goa could also be seen in a new light, instead of being seen as a tiny region with no influence in today’s world, best suited only for vacation.

However, this information cannot be available through the institutions that hold it today.

See also:

Fernandes, Newman. “Collectio Racholensis.” Streams of Water, Tomazinho Cardozo, ed., Prof. Newman Fernandes Felicitation Committee Publication, Candolim, 2010, pp. 59–76.

Menezes Rodrigues, Maria Pia de. Texts, Tomes, Treasures: The evolution of Goa’s Publica Livraria (1832–2005). Goa 1556, 2014.

Scholberg, Henry. “Journalism in Portuguese India, 1821–1961.” Unpublished paper. Shared via email in Mar 2000.