Pune: Thanks to a collaboration between the Union ministry of culture and Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (
C-DAC), more than a lakh museum pieces have embraced the digital age.
Around 1.09 lakh art objects have been digitized and uploaded to Jatan, an online repository of museum collections.
The aim of the project is to make the entire collections of these museums available to the general public. "The online portrayal of such an enormous variety of collections from so many different museums is being done for the first time in the country," a culture ministry official said.
According to the official, the practice at museums in India and abroad is to display only a fraction of their collections to visitors to their galleries. The bulk of the collections are kept in storage. "However, this portal will display the entire collection — including reserved collections — of every museum under the ministry," the ministry official said.
As a part of this project, all the museums have installed the Jatan software, along with the digitization equipment, computers, storage and network infrastructure.
C-DAC had in the past organized special training programmes for curators of the museums and their operators. They were trained in the operation of the software as well as the digitization technology.
'Jatan: Virtual Museum Builder' is a digital collection management system, specially designed and developed for Indian museums. The system is compliant with open source and standardized formats and helps in image processing, watermarking, unique numbering and managing digital images with multimedia representations of the antiquities in terms of 360° interactive panoramic views, 3D models, audio and video clips.
