NCAA becomes the World's first trusted digital repository
The National Cultural Audiovisual Archives (NCAA), a project of the Ministry of Culture of India, which represents the nation's cultural diversity in audio-visual form, has been certified as the world’s first Trusted Digital Repository as per ISO 16363:2012 standard, by the United Kingdom-based Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorisation Body Ltd. (PTAB). The NCAA is hosted by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), with objectives such as to to identify and preserve the cultural heritage of India available in audiovisual form through a process of digitisation and making it available to the peoples, periodic upgradation of the methods and technologies used in storage and retrieval of resources, conducting awareness programmes and building capacity for conservation, cataloguing, metadata creation of audiovisual resources.
Currently, NCAA has a total of 21 Partnering Institutions from across the country, covering 11 governmental and 10 non-governmental cultural organisations and also it has digitized over 23,000 hours of unpublished audiovisual recordings. NCAA pilot digital repository was developed in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation by C-DAC, Pune. NCAA digital repository is established with and powered by DIGITĀLAYA, which is also developed by C-DAC, Pune in accordance with Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model ISO 14721:2012. The IGNCA is a chief research institute dedicated to holistic understanding and expression of Indian arts with respect to inter and multi-disciplinary nature, set up by the Government of India.The centre most importantly aims at serving as a major national resource centre for the arts. The IGNCA has been designated as the nodal agency for a data bank on art, humanities and cultural heritage. The Centre has also been identified by UNESCO as the nodal agency for the development of regional databases for South and South East Asian countries on art, cultural heritage and lifestyles through the application of state-of-the-art technologies for standardization and also, exchange and dissemination of data. Read the full article
