The central government’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) programme can potentially help democratise knowledge, especially for students and researchers at institutes with limited resources for expensive journal and database subscriptions. ONOS would also initiate a wider debate on digital resources, digitisation, and the challenges of conducting research in India.
In recognising the relationship between digital access and the production of quality research, the government is certainly on the right track. Large online databases have profoundly transformed the nature of scholarly work, but they have also resulted in staggering global asymmetries of information. In the sciences, publishing consortiums like Elsevier make online journal access excessively expensive for researchers in the developing world. In the humanities, databases of regional histories are often out of reach for in-region scholars. A particularly egregious example is ProQuest’s database of The Times of India’s archives: It is easier to access at a wealthy university in London or Boston than in the newspaper’s home city, Mumbai.
ONOS must be seen in light of two ground realities about research in India.
The first is the low quality of existing Indian databases. Digitisation should promote the democratisation of knowledge, but that will happen when databases are professionally managed, constantly maintained, and vigorously expanded. Indian digitisation efforts have foundered due to a lack of resources, competing initiatives, and declining interest. The Digital Library of India — begun in the early 2000s and defunct by 2017— is a good example (the American website archive.org, thankfully, has mirrored its content).
Many Indian libraries and archives have in-house digitisation projects, but these have not always been well managed. The National Archives of India has done commendable work in digitising parts of its collection through Abhilekh Patal. This database, however, is riddled with problems. The website is frequently inaccessible, its search function is not optimal, and its “digitise on demand” function does not always work. I, like many other scholars, have paid for digitised items which I have never received. At other facilities, digitisation projects continue to rely on untrained staff and obsolete technology, such as CDs.
Other countries can provide India with models of professionally managed, state-of-the-art digitisation efforts that have truly democratised knowledge. The Qatar Digital Library has made vast tracts of the British Library’s collections publicly accessible. Brazil’s Projeto Resgate Barão do Rio Branco has accomplished the same goal for Brazilian material in foreign repositories. India should study such models, integrating ONOS within a much more robust domestic digital infrastructure.
However, digitisation has its limits. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan became research powerhouses in the 19th and 20th centuries by building great research libraries. These libraries remain vital hubs of knowledge production in the 21st century. India, in contrast, has mostly let its research libraries rot away.
Digital resources can never constitute a full substitute for physical resources. To be truly productive, Indian researchers will need resources like ONOS alongside more “old fashioned” things: Well-stocked libraries, properly maintained archival collections, and professionally trained librarians and archivists. Recent cyberattacks against the British Library and Cambridge University Press only further highlight this reality: Digital resources can vanish in the blink of an eye.
For over the past decade, I have closely monitored the state of Indian archives and libraries. Institutions such as Ashoka University and the National Centre for Biological Sciences prove that India can build world-class research facilities. However, conditions in most public institutions remain grim. Collections are being destroyed due to inadequate preservation and incompetent management. A librarian at a major state government research library in Mumbai told me that they do not have funds to purchase acid-free boxes, without which priceless collections will simply crumble into oblivion. At many state archives, there is no temperature control. Rain, rats, fungus, and insects further destroy records and books. Disintegrating volumes are held together with coarse jute twine.
Indian libraries and archives are obsessed with one glaringly out-of-date preservation technology: Lamination. By indiscriminately sticking thin sheets of tissue paper on fragile documents, preservationists can inflict long-term damage. Lamination is a technology that, starting in the 1980s, was phased out in the rest of the world (it remains useful when applied with absolute discrimination, using only high-quality tissue paper).
Organisations like INTACH, which should know better, have continued to promote it on a mass scale. I have witnessed the consequences. Letters by Mahatma Gandhi are now unreadable, priceless nineteenth-century newspapers are cracked and warped, and blurred ink on centuries-old religious manuscripts result from sloppy application of tissue paper.
At some facilities, digitisation has also meant destruction. Digitisation is done by low-cost, badly-trained contractors who inflict irreversible damage on collections. After digitisation, original documents are lost or misplaced. Many years ago, a digitisation project at the National Library of India destroyed collections of 18th-century books. Low-cost contractors carelessly ripped pages out of books to make them easier to scan on cheap flatbed scanners. Needless to say, all of this makes the Indian research environment an even more difficult terrain to navigate.
One may rightly ask: What does this have to do with ONOS?
When thinking about digitisation and digital resources, India needs to avoid creating its own asymmetries of information. ONOS and similar efforts are commendable, but they need to be coupled with meaningful investments — of both monetary and human capital — in existing physical repositories. I worry that digital projects like ONOS will distract from the urgent task of rescuing library and archival collections from oblivion. While we gain access to foreign journals, we continue subjecting irreplaceable Indian collections to out-of-date preservation methods, shoddy facilities, and poorly-trained staff and management.
Across the world, governments have continued to meaningfully invest in research libraries and archives while building digital infrastructure. To improve research productivity, India must do the same. Poor stewards of extant knowledge will be poor producers of new knowledge.
The writer is associate professor of history at the S P Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai.
