Template:All Projects/Year/2017

Mahajana College Documentation

Project Number	NF/PG/2017/0006	Grant Agency / Donors	Noolaham Foundation	Project Owner	Kopinath Thillainathan
Project Mentor	Kopinath Thillainathan	Project Locations	Jaffna	Project Period	2017
Stakeholders	Mahajana College, Staff and Volunteers of Noolaham Foundation

Documenting Tellipalai Mahajana College In 2013, Noolaham Foundation began to take efforts to record the histories of schools by documenting their publications. In general, schools in Eelam do have a tradition of preserving archives. Information pertaining to schools can be found in the annual reports, principal’s reports, publications by student clubs and alumni, jubilee year publications, etc. Even such publications are not properly preserved in schools. The ones that are preserved are not available to the larger public.This project, in 2013, documented the publications brought out by Royal College, Colombo and Jaffna Hindu College. In 2014, publications issued by Vembady Girls’ High School were documented. As continuation of this initiative, Tellipala Mahajana College is documented.

• Full Report

Digital Preservation at Eastern University

Project Number	NF/PG/2017/0005	Grant Agency / Donors	Noolaham Foundation	Project Owner	Kopinath Thillainathan
Project Mentor	Kopinath Thillainathan	Project Locations	Eastern	Project Period	2017
Stakeholders	Eastern University and Noolaham Foundation

In diversifying the activities conducted in line with the policies of Noolaham Foundation and in identifying creative objects that come from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, documenting materials originating from the Eastern Province is important. It is vital to invite the contribution of undergraduates, lecturers, experts and archivists to these initiatives.This project seeks the participation of the academic community in the East in strengthening and widening the collections that are available in the public domain. This project was designed with a view to achieving this goal. This project aims at collecting and digitizing documents in custody of the Tamil speaking communities in the Eastern Province.

• Full Report

Survey and digitisation of individual manuscript collections in Northern Sri Lanka (Endangered Archives Programme 1056)

Project Number	NF/PG/2017/0004	Grant Agency / Donors	British Archive	Project Owner	Kopinath Thillainathan
Project Mentor	Kopinath Thillainathan	Project Locations	Northern , SriLanka	Project Period	2017
Stakeholders	Staff and Volunteers of Noolaham Foundation

Community Outreach & Dissemination Creating awareness about palm-leaf manuscripts, and the need for preservation, was one of the main aims of this project. Many people have only heard of manuscripts and have never seen them in real life, or even digitally. Thus, we held four community outreach events to engage the public in this project. The original intention of these events was to help identify custodians. Although these events did not help in identifying custodians directly, they helped in building rapport and awareness about the mission of the project. The most successful of these events was the Palm-leaf manuscripts exhibition held toward the end of the project. It was held over a three day period and over 400 people attended the exhibition, including students, custodians, librarians, and researchers. More than fifty people provided written feedback about the event, which was overwhelmingly positive. The event received wide media coverage, including via newspaper, television, radio and online media. As noted above, the palm-leaf manuscript reading workshop was also very successful.

• Full Report

Multimedia Documentation of Traditional Trades and Crafts of Eastern, Northern and Up-Country Sri Lanka (Wikimedia Foundation)

Project Number	NF/PG/2017/0003	Grant Agency / Donors	Wikimedia Foundation	Project Owner	Natkeeran L Kanthan
Project Mentor	Natkeeran L Kanthan	Project Locations	Jaffna	Project Period	2017 - 2020
Stakeholders	Staff and Volunteers of Noolaham Foundation

Tamil Wikipedia has played a pioneering venue for recording the knowledge base of the Tamil speaking communities and knowledge available in the Tamil language. We have been compiling various details about the Tamil speaking communities. However, there are obstacles to recording some important knowledge systems. These obstacles include lack of supplementary resources, lack of appropriate precedence, lack of internet connectivity and lack of committed users. One of the areas that has not receive adequate attention is traditional professional arts and crafts and knowledge bases associated with such arts and crafts. This project seeks document via multimedia platforms information pertaining to professional arts and crafts in practice in Jaffna, Malaiyaham and Batticaloa.

• Full Report

Center for Oral History Research

Project Number	NF/PG/2017/0002	Grant Agency / Donors	Noolaham Foundation	Project Owner	Kopinath Thillainathan
Project Mentor	Kopinath Thillainathan	Project Locations	Sri Lanka	Project Period	2017-2020
Stakeholders	Staff and Volunteers of Noolaham Foundation

This project was undertaken with the objective of introducing the Center for Oral History Research which is involved in multimedia documentation. The project also aimed to record oral histories, disseminating oral histories as a research method, training researchers in the field of oral histories.

• Full Report

Noolaham Digital Library Collection Development 2017

Project Number	NF/PG/2017/0001	Grant Agency / Donors	Noolaham Foundation	Project Owner	Kopinath Thillainathan
Project Mentor	Kopinath Thillainathan	Project Locations	Jaffna	Project Period	2017 January - 2017 December
Stakeholders	Staff and Volunteers of Noolaham Foundation

This project is undertaken annually by Noolaham Foundation. Digitizing material donated and lent by writers and those who collect documents, digitizing documents that are gathered under various initiatives, digitizing documents that are absent in the existent digitized collections, and adding multimedia documents are some of the tasks carried out under this project. Under this project 20, 000 documents were uploaded on Noolaham and Avanaham sites in 2017. The Avanaham site was inaugurated on the Thai Pongal day of 2017. The milestones achieved during this year include multimedia documentation initiatives conducted via Avanaham and documenting oral histories.

• Full Report