Digital
Image Library for Cultural Heritage of Sri Lankan Tamils - A first step towards
preserving the living heritage of Tamils in Sri Lanka
The investment in cultural preservation of a
war torn society is a contribution to the restoration of the civil society. Cultural
heritage preservation has traditionally been dominated by the preservation of
tangible forms of culture that represent communities' histories. Libraries can
play a role in physically preserving some tangible aspects of different
cultures in the world. Sri Lanka has a rich and diverse multi-cultural and
linguistic heritage. In recent decades alternative approaches led to a
re-thinking of the priorities and processes of cultural preservation of this nation particularly
cultural, ethnical, linguistic and religious diversity of its people.
Image collections
are an essential component of the print and artifact collections of Foundation
for Library Awareness (FOLA) both of their artistic and documentary value which
have been collected over a period of time since its inception. Digital Image Library (DIL) is one of the
pilot project of FOLA and this research is a step forward to preserve the Living Heritage
of Sri Lankan Tamils through designing a
DIL.
The objective of this
research is to design a DIL in a constructive user friendly way with the
support of dspace, open source digital library software, to preserve the
cultural heritage of Sri Lankan Tamils and to describe a selective approach to cultural heritage conservation and
protection.
The images were
collected from various sources. The presently existing tangible and intangible heritage have been
produced by taking photographs. The heritage replaced by modern way of life and
lost their existence were collected by scanning the pictures available from print
resources such as books, journals, newspapers,
paintings, and collecting from websites.
Based on descriptive
analysis of topic of these images, they were classified as different
communities. At present 250 images were added into DIL under different
communities and collections. The DIL is bilingual in nature which enable the
user to search through Author, Title and
subject search. The searching of the
images can be made bilingual in Tamil and English where Title is searchable
with Tamil and Author & subject are searchable with English. But the
browsing can be used irrespective of language to approach the collection.
The DIL has not yet
networked online. Networking the DIL through internet will satisfy the second
objective of the work further to share the records of living heritage in
effective manner.
Finally, this paper
emphasizes of designing and updating this kind of digital image libraries and for this purpose explores some selective
ways to upgrade the DIL by encouraging the members of Tamil society to preserve
their cultural heritage through their active participation.
Key words: Digital Image Library; Living heritage-Sri
Lankan Tamils; Cultural Heritage- Sri Lanka;
Digitization-Images
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