A Tibetan manuscript at The Goethal Indian Library and Research Society. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

To preserve the past for the future, St Xavier’s College has embarked on a journey with Unesco to conserve its wealth of rare books and manuscripts. Driven by the urgent need to archive rare works marked by broken spines and brittle pages, Xaviers has become the first college in eastern India to be a part of Unesco’s Memory of the World Programme.

“On evaluating the assortment of rare books we realised the uniqueness of their collection and included them in our programme. Our objective is to preserve and conserve documentary heritage and provide wide access to rare collections through CD-ROMs and the Internet,” explained Anup Kumar Das, information specialist of Unesco, New Delhi.

Unesco will provide the Park Street college with technical guidelines and a fund of Rs 2.8 lakh for the six-month project of preservation and digitisation of 30,000 folios, especially for the benefit of research scholars. The process of conservation will be carried out in three phases starting this month with college librarian Bidyarthi Dutta as principal investigator.

The first stage will involve preparation and publication of an annotated bibliography of selected books followed by physical preservation through fumigation, deacidification and tissue lamination in the second stage. In the final phase the documents will be scanned and developed using the Greenstone Digital Library Software. The project is meant to be complete by May 2007 when the digital version will be distributed through Unesco and also made available on the college website, Unesco web world and a digital library portal.

“We received a very fast response to our proposal. Old and valuable books in our library, gifted to us by provincial governments and European missionaries, have started to decay. Digitisation will preserve them and also help us share these precious documents with all,” said Father P.C. Mathew, principal of St Xavier’s College, Calcutta.

An ancient library set up in 1870 reaches up to the third floor of the main college building and is divided into The Goethal Indian Library and Research Society (books dating back to 1549) and the College section (books published 1600 onwards). The collection includes rare books like Ancient Records of Egypt (1875), Life of Goethe (1883), the first biography on Goethe by Heinrich Duntzer, and A Biography of Queen Victoria (1902) by Sidney Lee. The library also has ancient Tibetan and south Indian manuscripts, original Aquatints by Thomas and William Daniell, and unusual curios like a Tibetan dagger, Japanese books with pages made of cloth and more.