EURINDIA is a 36 months project co-funded by the European
Commission under the
Economic
Cross Cultural Programme.
OBJECTIVES
This project will focus specifically on the history of the
economic relations (commercial, industrial, sea and land
trade, etc.), in particular the history of map drawing and
textile commerce from 15th century to present time. The
aim is to highlight the historical cross relations between
Europe and Asia by surveying, digitising and disseminating
on the Internet a large corpus of common historical documents
from public domain.
The specific objectives of the Eurindia
project will include:
Surveys and inventories of documents: localization
and identification of relevant collections (archives of
commercial and economic relations and map collections) in
public and private collections both in Europe and India.
The use of new international description standards of ISAD-G
(International Council of Archives) and XML-EAD encoding
system on a common database, will lead to the creation of
a large corpus of documents gathered from many archives,
through all centuries, between two continents, in order
to get a better knowledge of a common history.
Historical research on economic history and development:
from previous steps, namely record identification and communication,
a historical investigation should be developed to participate
in economic history with a focus on:
- textile commerce, considered as a constant exchange between
Europe and India;
- map drawing through the centuries and historical periods
to see the evolution of lands, cities, communication ways,
etc.
Development of information society: a challenge
for 21st century. The objective of Eurindia in this field
consists of being the interface of the economic and cultural
sectors by promoting the common archival cultural heritage
of Europe and India. The digitization of large numbers of
documents will show the input of new technologies on heritage
documents.
Support conservation and access actions for preservation
of archival documents:
- training sessions, in situ and by e-learning tools, will
provide useful information on conservation of documents
particularly sensitive to bad climatic conditions;
- surveys of preventive conservation and development of
conservation policies should help curators in charge of
collections.
Respect of international texts on intellectual property:
most historical documents are actually a public domain.
The reproduction by digital techniques brings about new
problems with Intellectual property laws, in Europe as well
as in India. This sub-objective should study the legal situation
in both continents and provide useful tools (tanks to training
sessions) for curators, archivists, and lawyers to find
fair use and legal reproduction solutions.
These tools, training sessions and the project of establishing
a "chart of public domain document reproduction"
should provide new financial and management resources for
archives of both continents. This project should be demonstrative
on specific topics (textile and map) and be later extended
to other types of documents.
Large public awareness of the importance of historical
trade and commercial archives. More specifically,
such awareness will be achieved through the publication
of surveys and inventories, the diffusion of documents on
the Internet (with a multilingual database) and traveling
exhibitions showing unique documents (reproductions).
TARGET GROUPS
Everyone in India and Europe interested in documentary research;
University scholars, historians, teachers and students from
both India and Europe;
New Technologies of Information and Communication (NTIC)
experts in both regions, with a growing interest in the
information society.
MAIN ACTIVITIES
Surveys and inventories of collections in Europe and India;
Digitization of documents using new description and format
standards as well as the diffusion through a website;
Training sessions on conservation, preservation and control
of access to archives;
Training and chart of fair application of intellectual property
laws on public domain with respect to ownership of documents
in case of reproduction. This should provide new resources
for archives.
