Ongoing Projects

Cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies house remarkable collections of cultural artifacts. It is the responsibility of the staff working for those institutions to preserve, protect and provide responsible stewardship for the materials, and to the best of their ability, provide continued long-term access (Russell)

Advances in technology allow institutions to provide expanded access and education; however, there are important priorities that must be addressed prior to embarking on a digital conversion project.

Digitization in an archival environment includes taking a physical object or analog item, such as manuscripts, a map, or correspondence, from a collection that is rare or unique, often extremely fragile, and taking photographs of the item, and transferring the photographs to a digital medium. The negatives or prints are scanned into digital format such as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format).

Balochistan Archives has taken the step to provide a large number of users’ access to unique or special collections’ material that may be the most attractive feature of digital conversion projects.

Currently the Digital preservation Lab of Balochistan Archives is scanning the Agent to Governor General (AGG) records to provide access and “publicize” the material to researchers, other departments and peers, and to demonstrate the importance of the collections.