Santiniketan: A Visva-Bharati team headed by officiating vice-chancellor Sabuj Koli Sen on Monday held meetings with officials of the ministry of culture in New Delhi in a bid to digitise Rabindranath Tagore's personal library and around 8 lakh pages of ancient manuscripts kept at the varsity's archives.

The varsity officials also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), a centre for research under ministry of culture, which agreed to set up a manuscript preservation centre on the campus as well as to digitise audio-visual archives of Visva-Bharati.

Varsity officials said apart from digitising its ancient manuscripts, the manuscript preservation centre would help preserve the original manuscripts.

Officiating VC Sen told The Telegraph from New Delhi: "The digitisation of manuscripts is urgent as those are ancient. We are happy that the ministry of culture has promised us to extend all kinds of help to digitise Tagore's personal library, audio visual archives along with the manuscripts. The joint secretary of ministry Nirupam Kotru has assured us he would visit Santiniketan soon."

There are over 250 books in Tagore's personal library, which were used by Tagore in his lifetime. The personal library is kept at Rabindra Bhavana and common readers can't access them. There are many rare and old books like complete works of American short story writer and poet Bret Harte published in 1890, Life Movement in Plants by Jagadish Chandra Bose published in 1918 and From the Eastern Sea by Japanese author Yone Noguchi published in 1903.

On the other hand, there are many ancient manuscripts between 500 to 300 years old written mostly on palm leaves, clothes and homemade papers in stock of Visva-Bharati which are kept in Lipika Manuscriptorium. There is a rare manuscript on paper, Jogir Gaan, which was collected by Rabindranath Tagore himself from Bangladesh.

"There are rare manuscripts of Dharma Mangal by Ramai Pandit which is around 250 years old, written on palm leaves. There is a Sanksrit manuscript of Manusanhita which is around 500 years old. These manuscripts have become brittle. We approached the varsity authorities at least one and half years ago for digitising those manuscripts. We are happy as the IGNCA will now help us to digitise all these manuscripts by setting up a manuscript preservation centre," an official in Visva-Bharati said.

There are also 60,000 negatives and 40,000 photographs of Tagore along with black and footages of Tagore and Santiniketan.

"The IGNCA has agreed to digitise the entire audio visual archive of Rabindra Bhavana. After meeting with several officials of cultural ministry we are really happy that our visit to Delhi was successful. The ministry of culture has assured us to visit Visva-Bharati this month," Nilanjan Banerjee, special officer of Rabindra Bhavana who accompanied the officiating VC, said.

Sources in varsity said, Visva-Bharati needs a fund of at least Rs 10 crore to start the process of digitising the its properties in the archive. But the team of varsity held meetings with the ministry officials requesting them to extend help of experts to gauge the requirement and preserve its properties.