Bhaktivedanta Research Center
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Manuscript Mission
The first pillar of BRC's mission is the Manuscript Mission, where teams are sent out to remote corners of India and Bangladesh to collect and digitize rare manuscripts. Over the past decade, BRC has conducted over 50 visits to remote villages, libraries, and temples across India and Bangladesh to digitize over 1,250 manuscripts, including the original handwriting of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
Collections
BRC Kolkata's proactive initiatives have helped conduct over fifty manuscript missions across the Indian subcontinent. Owing to its dedicated infrastructure for preserving fragile materials, the BRC Kolkata has received numerous manuscripts as donations. It now has over a thousand manuscripts preserved digitally and around seventy physical manuscripts. This treasure trove of manuscripts has content on a wide-range of subjects including Sahitya, Vyakarana, Vedanta, Vaidya, Agama, Tantra, Nyaya and Mantra Sastra. Most of the manuscripts are in Sanskrit language and the scripts are chiefly in Bengali and Oriya. Some of the texts in the manuscripts are also accompanied by commentaries.
A sizable percentage of manuscripts are classified as rare. BRC Kolkata has a temperature-controlled room, fumigation chamber and a fire-proof cabinet to preserve them safely. Some of the fragile manuscripts have also been preserved on zinc-plates.
Digitization
Since its inception, BRC has been focused on digitally preserving its treasured collections and making them available to research scholars worldwide. With generous contributions from various patrons we acquired a state-of-the-art Bookeye 4 scanner in March 2011 which is kept in our Kolkata branch. Since then we have been regularly digitizing manuscripts, books and journals, especially those which are out of print today. We are also in the process of hosting them on public websites like archive.org for the benefit of all. BRC Kolkata also has a portable table scanner for quick scanning of materials. Till date more than nine hundred books and five thousand newspapers have been scanned.
Digitization
Storage & Preservation
Storage & Preservation
Fumigation Chamber with a Tray of Dichlorobenzene
Our preservation techniques include the processes of fumigation and lamination. In fumigation, our objective is to make the material insect free while preserving the paper. Any rare book that we acquire is first placed in the fumigation chamber at the library for twenty-two days with dichlorobenzene and once it is insect free then we catalogue it and put it back on the shelves.
Lamination Procedure for Preserving a Rare Collection
For increasing the longevity of our precious collection, we laminate the photos, books, etc. by first de-acidifying and then alkalinizing them. We have thus preserved over five thousand issues of Nadiya Prakash newspaper and one thousand issues of Gaudiya magazine.