Building an Image Repository for Indian Cultural Heritage Materials – a Digital Library Approach

Digitization has immense potential to store, preserve, disseminate and redistribute cultural materials, if the materials are captured in a bit stream format so as to enable to access through network for learning and understanding the history and culture of a civic society. Generally these materials are stored in museums or in libraries, but they can be spread over the globe and with the spread of the Internet, such contents can be made available to any corner of the world. Universal access implicitly assumes a largely unidirectional flow of information from the developed world to the developing world but the latter is often richer in traditional wisdom, crafts, and cultural artifacts: digital technologies have the potential to preserve that heritage and make it accessible. For developing an Image Repository for photographs of Ancient cultural material by using the advanced digital technology is a challenge, which include description of the photographs of Indian cultural Heritage Materials, Creating Metadata from the sample, Mapping the created metadata with Dublin Core, Developing an Image Repository System using Digital Library open source software etc. This paper is the result of the case study of such an attempt by the authors on exploring Open Source Digital Library Software, DSpace, for preserving the cultural heritage materials.