Two Centuries of Indian Print: pilot project on Bengali Books

Title	Academic Symposium - Videos
Description	On 14th and 15th July 2017, the project organised a two-day academic symposium at Jadavpur University on South Asian Book History, inviting researchers, scholars and practitioners from UK, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The symposium was co-organised by the British Library Two Centuries of Indian Print team and our partner institute in Kolkata, India, The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, with the contribution of our Co-Investigator and Post-doctoral researcher in Jadavpur. The symposium featured 25 speakers, of which 1 gave a keynote speech, 20 presented research papers and 4 participated in a roundtable discussion. The symposium covered a wide-range of issues and subjects, including grammar and typography in early printed books; print-house practices and personnel; identity and print; print and the public sphere; solo works/authors in the Age of Reproduction; topographies of print; digital expressions of South Asian print and preservation of print in the digital era. The academic symposium was advertised widely, within the scholarly community and public, in the UK and South Asia on the Two Centuries of Indian Print website, twitter and facebook. The talk was attended by over 150-200 people, and was covered in national media (online and print) in India such as the South Asian Times, and the Millennium Post. A series of videos were made that are available on the project webspace.
Type Of Art	Film/Video/Animation
Year Produced	2017
Impact	The videos of the Academic Symposium is very valuable, as it is a record of the expert speakers and their presentation for those that could not make it, or for future researchers, work streams and interested members of the public. This can be used to great effect on our webspace and for promotional work. https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/videos?_ga=2.249745798.1271718818.1552473686-970405285.1508153097
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/videos?_ga=2.249745798.1271718818.1552473686-970405285....

Title	Art work for Digital Workshop - Jadavpur University December 2016
Description	Our partners at Jadavpur University were key to planning and executing the Digital Workshop held at Jadavpur in December of 2016, by contributing staff time and organisation and promotion of it to a wide range of cultural heritage institutions in Kolkata. A unique artwork that was developed and produced for the workshop, which was then made into the poster and as a cover for printed material associated with the workshop. The image was inspired from the content, fonts, and images in the early printed Bengali materials that are being digitised as part of the project. This image was used in all promotion including on Twitter and through Facebook accounts. This proved a very effective way of promoting the workshop and garnered a great deal of attention and interest.
Type Of Art	Artwork
Year Produced	2016
Impact	The Digital workshop was attended by 27 library and information professionals from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions in Kolkata, and well received with good feedback. we also had excellent feedback on the artwork developed and produced for this. We are now planning our second Digital Workshop which will be held in the summer of 2017. More details on the project are here: http://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print
URL	http://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print

Title	Community Engagement - Videos
Description	During Nov 2016 we delivered and contributed to a series of 3 Community Workshops with local community groups and groups that were part of charities. During these engagement the attendees were given a tour of the building and we arranged for them to see the Reading Rooms and our unique and rare items. We have videos of Community group members engaging with our South Asian collections including a song sung from one of our Bengali early printed books.
Type Of Art	Film/Video/Animation
Year Produced	2016
Impact	The video of our community groups and members engaging with the South Asian and early printed Bengali material is very valuable, as it shows the way that the general public can have a personal connection with our collections. This can be used to great affect on our webspace and for promotional work, and one to promotional work with charity and other local community groups.

Title	Dance performance
Description	Dr Priyanka Basu has used her skills in Odissi to do the following dance performances: Performed classical Odissi at the British Library Bengali New Year Celebrations, 29th April 2017 at the Knowledge Centre, British Library London; Performed Odissi for The HOPE UK Foundation charity event for street children in Kolkata on August 19th 2017, London; Performing Odissi the SOAS Indian Dance Society Annual Dance Programme on December 8th, 2017, SOAS London.
Type Of Art	Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc)
Year Produced	2017
Impact	The dance performance was a very creative way to use the team's skills in other areas to engage with the community and South Asian audiences and a great way that the general public can have a personal connection with our project.

Title	Fundraising Video -
Description	As part of promotion and fundraising for the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, we developed, organised and filmed a promotional video for the project which featured our Principal Investigator, British Library conservators and our Co-Investigators at the Shristi Institute of Art, Design and Technology and Jadavpur University. This video required a lot of participation, planning, story boarding and research from a wide range of external and internal participants. The video is available to view on the project page: https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print.
Type Of Art	Film/Video/Animation
Year Produced	2016
Impact	The promotional video was key to the early and ongoing fundraising and promotional efforts by the British Library for the project. It was used on fundraising trips, promotional conferences and talks and government communications by the Chief Executive, Chief Librarian, Head of Department, Principal Investigator and Project Manager. It was also used for media and general public enquiries and other wider interest in the project from other related institutions. It was a key tool in engaging with all audiences.
URL	https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print.

Title	Publication of a special edition of a high-impact journal on Islam and Print in South Asia
Description	In Phase 2 20 researchers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Europe and America gathered for a series of two workshops, that took place at the British Library on 28 September, 2018 and 26 October, 2018, to present their research stemming from their engagement with the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project and to create an international research network of contributors to the project's research outcomes. Both workshops helped to widen scope of earlier scholarship to focus on texts on a range of matters, in different vernaculars, not limited to, but including: Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Dobhashi (Bangla Musulmani), Muslim Mapilla, Sindhi and Pashto. Plans were made for future related activity and will also result in the publication of a special edition of a high-impact journal, making these findings available publicly.
Type Of Art	Creative Writing
Year Produced	2019
Impact	Plans made for future related activity and will also result in the publication of a special edition of a high-impact journal, making these findings available publicly. https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/indian-print/files/2018/09/Islam-and-Print-Programme-28-September-corrected.pdf https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/indian-print/files/2018/10/Islam-and-Print-Programme-26-October.pdf

Title	Quarterly Lists Catalogue Records of Indian Printed Books - Datasets on BL labs
Description	The Two Centuries of Indian Print project at the British Library has digitised and made available searchable scans of its collection of bound volumes of Quarterly Lists. The Quarterly Lists are printed catalogue records of books published quarterly and by province in British India between 1867 and 1947. They amount to approximately 82, 000 scanned images. The catalogues are predominantly in English language with some Bengali and mostly arranged in table format, capturing descriptive metadata about the books, including the name and addresses of printers and publishers, the number of copies printed and often the price, as well as further information. As well as the datasets being available on the British Library BL labs space to download s zip files in their entirety: https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/, the project has also produced Optical Character Recognition xml files, which are text-searchable for researchers, of the pre-1947 Quarterly Lists. Digital Curator Tom Derrick is assessing and improving the quality where possible and once completed - these will be available freely online to the public.
Type Of Art	Artefact (including digital)
Year Produced	2017
Impact	The collection has been advertised and is being used by researchers globally. This dataset represents a valuable research tool for digital research into the history of the book trade in South Asia. It is the first time that searchable scans of this material have been made available on-line, and this data will permit researchers to formulate novel research questions about the subject matter contained in the Quarterly Lists.
URL	https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/

Title	South Asian Seminars - Podcasts
Description	The project team have organised a South Asia Seminar Series for a general audience that presents the ideas and research on the BL's South Asia collection by researchers and writers from the UK and internationally. These public seminars take place every two weeks and are free of charge; they are advertised on the British Library 'What's On' website calendar of public events. The general public and local communities are encouraged to attend these seminars. The project team promote these seminars through Twitter, Facebook, the project webpage, the British Library's public event listing, and by the distribution of fortnightly seminar descriptions around BL reading rooms and public areas. Almost all of the seminars are sold out, meaning all 60 available spaces are booked out. For any seminars that are not sold out the general numbers we have come to expect are between 30-50 people in attendance. These seminars were very popular with an average attendance was 30-60 people per seminar. To date there have been 52 seminars, which ensures that the seminars will be captured for people that could not attend or our global audience. Through the success of these seminars more are planned for Spring/Summer 2019.
Type Of Art	Film/Video/Animation
Year Produced	2016
Impact	These seminars were very popular with an average attendance was 30-60 people per seminar. To date there have been 52 seminars, which ensures that the seminars will be captured for people that could not attend or our global audience. Through the success of these seminars more are planned for Spring/Summer 2019.
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/events

Title	Two Centuries of Indian Print Postcards and Bookmarks
Description	In July 2017, we developed and printed a series of 4 postcards and 2 bookmarks created using images from the collections items that are being digitised as part of the project, with captions. These were developed to coincide with the launch of the web space, and with the team trip to Kolkata India to promote the project, hold the 2 day Academic Symposium, hold a Digital Capacity Building Workshop, and meet with library leaders, archivists, technical companies and museum in India. These postcards have proved very popular and are regularly used in community, public, and scholarly events to promote the work of the project.
Type Of Art	Artwork
Year Produced	2017
Impact	These postcards greatly aid the promotion of the project through the dissemination of attractive images and the different subject areas from the books that are being digitised as part of the project, the URL for the website and details of the twitter feed, and other contact details. They have proved very popular and are regularly used in community and scholarly events to promote the work of the project and spread information about its research outputs and online materials.

Description	The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of specialists in digital curating, data analysis and the digital humanities as well as in the history of the languages and scripts of South Asia. The Co-Investigators, namely the Digital Curator for Asian and African Studies at the British Library and Digital Humanities expert (previously at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology) are both specialists in forming research questions around the historical analysis of data sets, in particular for both Bengali book history and the application of digital humanities methods to South Asian studies. The Co-Investigator at Jadavpur University is an expert on early printed Bengali books and the Bengali book trade, and has also made major contributions to the digital resources for the study of Bengali books and has supervised a number of PhD students and projects on early Bengali book history. The former Principal Investigator and Head of the South Asian Section at the British Library brought knowledge of the British Library's South Asian early printed book collections, along with experience of managing large-scale complex projects across a range of teams and external institutions, including international partners. Our partner at SOAS, the Subject Librarian for South Asia and Development Studies, worked on the metadata and digitisation elements of the project, and brought to the team expertise in how academic researchers use the SOAS collection. The skills of the PI and CIs are complemented by project staff, including a specialist Project Curator, who provides linguistic expertise in Bengali language and the history of publishing in Bengal, a Digital Curator, who focuses on digital scholarship with a more technical background, and Research Fellows at Jadavpur, who provide further historical context and research on the early Bengali book trade, as well as expertise concerning current trends in research on this topic in academic institutions in India. A number of engagement and skills sharing activities have been delivered and are planned for the project. These are listed below. Engagement - Research/Scholars/General Public - Since November 2016 a series of 67 seminars were held in the Library on related South Asian subjects, engaging scholars and researchers and the general public interested in South Asian material in the Library and beyond. These seminars were on diverse subjects like musical performance and women, the history of the culinary world of Mughal elite, and the 'High' and 'Low' of the farce in Colonial Bengal. IMPACT: These were very well attended, with more researchers and key people in South Asian studies coming forward to chair, present and participate. The pandemic has only increased attendance with the seminars now being held online and welcoming hundreds of scholars all across the globe. - As part of our community engagement we contributed to a series of 9 successful outreach workshops with local members of the community and grassroots community groups and organisations. IMPACT: These were very well attended and the local attendees enjoyed engaging personally with the objects at the British library that were part of their cultural heritage. More community engagement sessions will be organised. - The project team continued to hold 'Show and Tell' sessions of South Asian collection items holding a total of 29 official visits with attendees from the UK government, South Asian ministers and members of parliament, the SOAS History of Heritage in South Asia, as well as a group of MPs from the government of India on 10 November as part of the 2016 Chevening Parliamentarians' Fellowship Programme, and various philanthropic engagement. - The project team continue to participate in and attend conferences - to date 65 have been delivered or are scheduled to be delivered. IMPACT: we receive excellent feedback, widen our network of engagement and contacts, with the ultimate objective of securing promotion, publicity and further funding. Skills - Sharing Digital Workshops As part of our capacity building for the project we contributed to a series of digital workshops in India, with participants from several regions in South Asia as well as from the UK and abroad. To date we have delivered eight capacity building and skill sharing workshops. The workshops examine how to plan digitisation workflows, digital preservation and metadata standards, and digital humanities research methods with creative reuse of digitised collections, with practical sessions to encourage skills exchange and learning. Participants have included members of the general public and researchers, students of information technology, professionals in the technology industry, as well as professionals working in archives, museums, libraries and other public and third sector cultural heritage institutions. This has a great impact on our work, allowing us to promote and develop the sharing of skills in digital humanities research and to build capacity in the region. We regularly receive positive feedback from the participants and ideas on what to feature in the next seminars. Participant feedback is actively encouraged and gathered and attendees believe their knowledge of and comfort with digital scholarship concepts and methodologies have increased as a result of the workshop training. We also make the training materials, PowerPoint presentations, and datasets available on our project web space, and ensure that the research methodologies taught in the courses are based on open-access software or publicly available online tools. We are planning to continue our programme of skill sharing and capacity building activities in the future strand of the project in relation to our collections in Assamese and Sylheti. Feedback gathered from the workshops has shown more than 85% of attendees felt their level of knowledge has improved through undertaking the training. The team has also received feedback about what participants enjoyed most about the workshops, with the opportunities to try out OCR tools in practice and the group task to apply Digital Humanities techniques cited as the most beneficial parts of the workshops. Finally, feedback from across the workshops has shown widespread interest in receiving further training from the library in related digital humanities areas such as text and data mining and handwritten text recognition training. IMPACT: Promoting and developing skills-sharing - we received positive feedback from the participants and ideas on what to feature in the next seminars. While in India the project team presented talks at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum in Delhi, and took part in presentations and panel talks at the International Conference on Digital Libraries in Delhi which were attended by more than 50 delegates and live streamed around the world. The team built links and met with other cultural institutions while in India and Bangladesh including, the Bengal State Archives, Sreerampore Public Library, the Minister of Culture in Bangladesh, the Bangla Academy, Asiatic Society of Bengal Library, Dhaka University Library, National Library and the Archives, and the British Council. IMPACT: Ongoing work, but these go a long way to helping secure promotion, publicity and further funding. Key links were made in Bangladesh, and the team will keep all groups informed on the projects progress. The former Head of Collections and Curation at the British Library, and the Principle Investigator also met with the Indian Ministry of Culture and Tourism on the project's skills-sharing programme, confirming plans for a series of skills sharing and capacity building workshops in 2017/18 and 19 including a series of programmes of workshops and placements at the British Library providing opportunities for early-career researchers and librarians from Indian institutions to spend time in the British Library, working on research and digitisation projects and learning from other library teams by collaborating across the library. IMPACT: Through the organisation of capacity-building workshops and an academic workshop, the interdisciplinary project team will have opportunities to work closely together, and to build networks and collaborations with archivists and librarians in the UK and India. This combination of a variety of academic and professional backgrounds will lead to fruitful exchanges and expand the remit of the field of digital humanities to encompass South Asian data sets, languages, and histories, to create a more global remit for the digital humanities. All of the project outcomes, from enhanced catalogue records, to digital images, to workshop training materials and academic outputs, is shared freely on the project website, thereby disseminating this information globally. Digital outcomes: In the research strand of the project, the team analysed the metadata produced for the Bengali books digitised in the first strand of the project, and metadata for books in the SOAS library collection. The BL project team will collaborate with academics in the field of Digital Humanities to explore how these bibliographic records can be analysed, and how these datasets might allow researchers to pose new questions innovate new digital humanities research methods in the field of Bengali book history. For the first time the project has made freely available in digital format the Library's collection of Quarterly Lists. These are descriptive catalogue records of books published quarterly and by province of British India between 1867 and 1947. The Quarterly Lists are available to download as searchable PDFs and ALTO XML files via the British Library's datasets portal. Our Digital Curator has uploaded our project web space: http://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian- print - with the permanent exhibition space that will link to the scanned items and host the blogs, podcast and further resources on the project. To summarise some of our main achievements in audience engagement, public communication and community outreach: From November of 2016 and ongoing a series of public seminars are being held in the Library on subjects related to the history of the book in South Asia, engaging scholars and researchers as well as the general public interested in South Asian material in the British Library and beyond. These seminars are on diverse subjects drawn from the British Library's South Asian printed and manuscript collections, touching on topics from musical performance and women, the history of the culinary world of Mughal elite, and the history of the genre of 'Farce' in Colonial Bengal. This seminar series are very well attended, with more researchers and key people in South Asian studies coming forward to chair, present and participate, with podcasts available on our web page. These are important in bringing together like minded scholars and researchers to discuss and engage with the South Asian collections at the British Library and the project as a whole. Podcasts from the seminars have been uploaded to the Two Centuries of Indian Print project webpage, hosted in the British Library's site. As part of our community engagement we contributed to a series of 9 successful outreach workshops with local members of the community and grassroots organisations. These were very well attended and the local attendees enjoyed engaging personally with the objects at the British library that are part of their cultural heritage. These are important in highlighting our collections to our communities locally and stimulating engagement with the South Asian collections at the British Library and the project as a whole. More community engagement sessions will be organised for the coming year, as this aspect of our work is continuous and on-going. The project team continue to hold 'Show and Tell' sessions of South Asian collection items with 29 official visits held in total - attendees from the SOAS History of Heritage in South Asia, Museum Detox group, as well as several groups of MPs from the government of India as part of the Chevening Parliamentarians' Fellowship Programme, in addition to philanthropic engagement across a range of sectors and fields. These sessions have received excellent feedback, promoted the project and the work of the team, and widened our network of professional contacts across a range of sectors, with the ultimate objective of securing promotion, publicity and further funding. Summary of achievement in terms of skill sharing and capacity building: Eight digital capacity building workshops have been delivered by the project team across South Asia. The workshops examined how to plan digitisation workflows, digital preservation and metadata standards, and digital humanities research methods, and was attended by library and information professionals from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. These workshops promote and develop skills-sharing - we received positive feedback from the participants in the first workshop and applied the advice of the participants to the subsequent workshops, providing a more in-depth training in digital research methods. Two delegations of early career library professionals from the National Library of India have travelled to the British Library in London to attend capacity building workshops in September and November, 2017, organised by the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. We were told by the employees of the National Library that this was the first foreign professional development exchange that the NLI had participated in since 1983, and the librarians were very keen to develop the capacity building programme with the BL further. The outputs of Phase 1 and 2 can be used and taken forward by researchers in the following ways: The datasets generated by the digitisation the Quarterly Lists have been made available freely for public use and download and can be used by researchers both in the Digital Humanities, researchers of the social and intellectual history of South Asia, as well as researchers of publishing and the book trade in South Asia in the 19th and early 20th century. Our public seminars, capacity building workshops in the digital humanities, blog posts, podcasts, scholarly publications, web resource, conference participation and attendance, and community outreach has reached a wide audience both in India and the UK, both amongst academics and the general public, that has promoted knowledge of our project, collections and research that can be used for future collaborations and research into our Bengali collections at the British Library. The results of our Bengali OCR challenge and work with tools such as Transkribus has contributed to the field of developing OCR technologies, and can be taken forward by anyone who is working on the development of OCR technologies for scripts that bear a similarity to Bengali. Our digital images and catalogue records that we are currently creating, once they have been made available on-line, will allow researchers anywhere in the world to search and view our Bengali collections, thereby opening up access to our collections, and allowing researchers to take this information forward in form of their own research projects. Access to the digital images will also benefit members of the general public who are interested in the cultural and literary heritage of Bengal, including artists and writers. Free digital access to these collections will also be of benefit to Bengali-speaking diasporas in the UK elsewhere, who could integrate both the contextual and historical information provided by the web resources, as well as the digital images of books, into their teaching, outreach, and cultural programming.
First Year Of Impact	2016
Sector	Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Security and Diplomacy
Impact Types	Cultural,Societal,Economic

Description	Digital Capacity Building Workshops
Geographic Reach	Asia
Policy Influence Type	Influenced training of practitioners or researchers
Impact	The project team undertake a series of digital humanities research workshops in India to facilitate the sharing of skills and methods in digital research for library professionals in order to build capacity in this field of work and research. More than 240 librarians, academics and information professionals have attended the three digital skills workshops delivered by the project. We have held 8 digital skill sharing and capacity building workshops in India to examine how to plan digitisation workflows, digital preservation and metadata standards, and digital humanities research methods with creative reuse of digitised collections, with practical sessions to encourage skills exchange and learning. Participants have included members of the general public and researchers, students of information technology, professionals in the technology industry, as well as professionals working in archives, museums, libraries and other public and third sector cultural heritage institutions. Feedback gathered from the workshops has shown more than 85% of attendees felt their level of knowledge has improved through undertaking the training. The team has also received feedback about what participants enjoyed most about the workshops, with the opportunities to try out OCR tools in practice and the group task to apply Digital Humanities techniques cited as the most beneficial parts of the workshops. Finally, feedback from across the workshops has shown widespread interest in receiving further training from the library in related digital humanities areas such as text and data mining and handwritten text recognition training. The first of our Digital Workshops was held at Jadavpur University on Wednesday Dec 7 2016. It was well-attended by 27 librarians and information science professionals and students from Bengal. Institutions in attendance included the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, the State Central Library of West Bengal, Kolkata Metropolitan Library, National Mission on Libraries, Indian Museum Library, Bengal Library Association, Jadavpur University, and Kolkata Little Magazine. The second Digital Workshop, held in July 2017, was a follow up of the first Digital Workshop held at Jadavpur University in Dec 2016. Attendees at that event expressed interest in receiving more technical training. Based on their feedback we decided to focus a half day workshop on optical character recognition for Bangla. We also ran a half day workshop for students of Jadavpur University introducing them to digital scholarship methods. 32 attended across the two sessions, 2 of whom attended both sessions. Workshop "Developments with Optical Character Recognition for Bangla" took place on Thursday 13th July, 2017. 19 professionals attended this workshop, from 10 different institutions. There was a mix of backgrounds, including librarians, faculty and those from computer science departments. The full list of attendees and their institutions is available on request. Dr. Naira Khan from the University of Dhaka's Computational Linguistics department introduced the key processes of how OCR works, from pre-processing through to segmentation and post-processing, highlighting the unique challenges for Bangla such as compound characters and ligatures. Tom then presented the practical applications of the OCR process within the context of a mass digitisation project of historical texts. The event concluded with a practical session where attendees used different OCR software on a sample of the BL's digitised Bengali books. They used Tesseract (using the command line), Transkribus, Google Drive, i2ocr and new OCR. Post-exercise feedback indicated Google Drive was the most accurate. Completed feedback forms indicate an improvement in the participant's knowledge of OCR after having attended the workshop. Only 6/17 attendees rated their knowledge in this area as 4 or 5/5 prior to the training, but 15/17 felt they had this level of knowledge after the training. When asked what they enjoyed most about the workshop, the opportunity to try out OCR tools during the practical session, especially Tesseract, was the reason mentioned most by most participants. Even for those who had some prior experience of OCR, usually only with Google, they all found the workshop acquainted them with new tools, some of whom were able to anticipate using for their own Bengali literature projects and databases and to save manual transcription. We also asked for opinions on what topics they would have liked covered in more depth and ideas for future workshops. The responses were wide ranging although there is a lot of interest in receiving expanded training around handwritten text recognition tools and initiatives, especially those for Indian languages. Being kept informed of the latest developments OCR for Indian language materials was also highlighted by a few participants as important to them. Other areas mentioned included more on OCR pre and post processing, programming skills if using command line, more time for a demo of the practical exercise. The third workshop was on the topic of Digitisation Standards and Workflows held Digital Workshop at the International Conference of Asian Libraries, New Delhi, India. The fourth workshop was held in Bangalore, 17-18January 2018, at the conference 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn in India' at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology Jointly organised by Srishti Institute and the University of Helsinki as part of the CIMO funded (Finnish National Agency for Education) 'DIG_IN: Digital Humanities Education Initiative Finland-India' project. Tom was invited by Padmini Ray Murray who heads Digital Humanities at Srishti, one of the project partners for 2CiP. The topic of the conference considered how digital technology might be effectively used to increase engagement, reach and access. Tom gave a presentation discussing the achievements of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project in supporting digital research. It was attended by about 50-60 people, Srishti students of mixed media, as well as a dozen or so speakers, many of whom were not academics, but rather technologists whose work intersects with cultural heritage. Day 1 focussed on community archiving, cultural heritage and memory institutions, exhibition design, and Indian cultural and linguistic content. Day 2 focussed on use of videogames and new media in the cultural heritage space. We finished with a 2 hour workshop which set the challenge of working in groups to design a web-based solution for a digital archive that would last 100 years. The point was to encourage thinking around open standards and interoperability. The cumulative impact of these workshops has been to raise the skill level of postgraduate and library professionals in improving digital accessibility to the materials held in archives and libraries, to facilitate capacity building in the field of digital humanities research methodology, and to foster regional and international collaborations in the development of new technical capacities and tools, such as OCR for Bengali language. The fifth Digital Workshop was hosted by Tom Derrick and Alia Carter which focussed on Digitisation Standards and Workflows. It was entitled: "Digitisation Standards" workshop at Association for Asian Studies Conference, India International Centre, New Delhi and held on the 6 July 2018. The event took place at the India International Centre, New Delhi and was a collaboration between the British Library, Ashoka University and American Institute for Indian Studies. 16 archivists each from different heritage institutions around India and Cambodia attended. The workshop was introduced by Shubha Chaudhuri, Associate Director General at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, before Tom presented the BL's digitisation standards followed by a talk on the IFLA guidelines for digitisation from Dr Suprabhat Majumdar, Chief Librarian at the India International Centre. Participants then got involved in a practical session which saw them break into 3 groups, each presented with a different case study of an archive and its holdings and asked to consider a digitisation strategy. The groups then presented back to the room. The workshop closed with a presentation from Tom on the lifespan of digital items after digitisation, namely how the BL has collaborated with researchers to encourage reuse of datasets. The workshop was part of the five day Association for Asian Studies conference, attended by Tom and Alia which also involved tours of various archives and libraries in Delhi, establishing links with cultural institutions based in India, attending talks and networking events. The sixth workshop was on Digitisation Standards & Workflows for Cultural Heritage; covering all aspects of the digitisation lifecycle, held at the The Asiatic Society of Mumbai on 5th February 2019. This workshop covered the practical aspects of undertaking digitisation. It focused on the digitisation of library and archival materials, though the principles are transferable to other formats. The training included guidance on lifecycle digitisation project planning, image specification and file formats, condition assessments, choosing equipment, and using optical character recognition to obtain machine readable texts that enable full text searching and big data analysis. The project as used as a case study to contextualise the various strands of digitisation and looked at how information technology is transforming research today, while also considering the creative ways that digital scholarship methodologies such as text mining, data visualisation and crowdsourcing could be applied to cultural heritage collections to enhance research potential. The seventh workshop was a two day workshop on Digitisation Workflows & Digital Research Studies Methodologies; held in IIT Indore on the11-12 February 2019 Day 1 covered the practical aspects of undertaking digitisation, focusing on the digitisation of library and archival materials, though the principles are transferable to other formats. The training included guidance on lifecycle digitisation project planning, image specification and file formats, condition assessments, choosing equipment, and using optical character recognition to obtain machine readable texts that enable full text searching and big data analysis. The project as used as a case study to contextualise the various strands of digitisation. Day 2 focussed on how information technology is transforming research today and considered the creative ways that digital scholarship methodologies such as text mining, data visualisation and crowdsourcing could be applied to cultural heritage collections to enhance research potential. Presentations from researchers revealed how they have applied digital research techniques to enhance their own research. The eigth and latest digital Workshop was held on the 20-21 August 2019 and was a digital workshop on archival standards for digitisation and digital research (with a colleague from British Library metadata services). The workshop took place at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and there were 41 attendees from 26 institutions, a mix of science archives, technology institutes and other cultural heritage institutions.
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/training-resources

Description	National Library of India Skill Exchange workshops
Geographic Reach	Asia
Policy Influence Type	Influenced training of practitioners or researchers
Impact	Two Skills Exchange Programmes were organised with the National Library of India to engage and promote capacity-building and skills-sharing elements between the two institutions. These programmes took place in September and November and were each five days in length. The programmes were match funded by the National Library of India; the NLI covered the cost of the Indian visa and travel costs, accommodation, and living expenses. Our contribution was the organisation of two five-day programmes providing presentations and tours led by staff members across all departments of the British Library, including staff based in London and York; and project team staff time in contributing to each programme and accompanying the visitors throughout their week at the British Library. The first Skills Exchange Programme was attended by five senior library officials from the National Library of India whose interests lay in learning about the operating structures of departments all across the Library, in particular Imaging Studios, Conservation, and managing collections metadata. The second Skills Exchange Programme was attended by five mid-level library officials from the NLI. This group had slightly different interests than the previous group in areas such as events and exhibitions, cataloguing, and outreach responsibilities with local community groups and children. Throughout their five days at the British Library, each group attended 17 presentations and 8 tours led by different members of BL staff across all different departments within the Library. The September Skills Exchange participants were senior library officials. They showed a great interest in operating systems in use at the Library such as the methods in which books, when ordered by readers, are sourced in the basements and transferred to reading rooms. They all expressed a keen interest in implementing a similar system in the NLI and were given a lot of technical information by managers in these areas who provided them with information they would need to do this. They were also very interested in E Legal Deposit and collections metadata; they received interactive presentations in both these areas. One official commented that he felt "upgraded with innovative ideas" after receiving these presentations The November Skills Exchange group left many examples of what they learned and what knowledge and ideas they will take back to implement in India. One of the officials praised the use of plastic bags for personal belongings in the reading rooms and plans to implement this system in the National Library of India on his return as a way to help monitor what readers bring into reading rooms. Another of the officials found the conservation of different materials and textiles very interesting and expressed a wish to collaborate with the British Library in organising a conservation workshop in India as she feels that due to the lack of staff in their conservation department they do not have as much training opportunities as they would like. Another official stated that having online access to the digitised material undertaken on the 2CIP project and the digitisation of other Indian related material, such as India Office Records, is a great opportunity for users around the world. All of the officials on both Programmes expressed a serious wish to collaborate in the digitisation of Indian material, mainly in relation to early printed Indian books and India Office Records, as they all felt that having this information accessible online would greatly enhance Indian research. Both the September and November Skills Exchange groups visited the British Library site at Boston Spa, York for a day during their week at the BL. On all of their feedback forms this was noted as a highlight of the week for them. They benefited from a guided tour of the deep storage facilities and the use of robotics in sourcing books upon reader requests at Boston Spa, as well as a tour of the Qatar Programme and the BL Imaging Studios both north and south, where they were given expert advice from both Imaging Studio managers on what machinery is used, for what material, and how it is maintained. The September group of senior library officials took a lot of information from these presentations and tours and plan to create a report detailing the need to invest in more up to date machinery for digitisation purposes at the NLI. No. of Skills Exchange Programmes: 2 Indian officials attending: 5 on each Programme; 10 total Number of Library staff members that contributed to each programme: 50 on each programme Total hours of presentations: 17 hours on each Programme; 34 hours total Total hours of tours: 8 hours; 16 hours total A full programme is available on request for each exchange.

Description	Workshop on Islam and Print in South Asia, British Library Sept and Oct 2018
Geographic Reach	Multiple continents/international
Policy Influence Type	Influenced training of practitioners or researchers
Impact	In Phase 2 20 researchers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Europe and America gathered for a series of two workshops, that took place at the British Library on 28 September, 2018 and 26 October, 2018, to present their research stemming from their engagement with the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project and to create an international research network of contributors to the project's research outcomes. The emergence of print in South Asia has been understood as a transformative moment for Islam in the Subcontinent, heralding a period of revival and reform from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. According to historians such as Francis Robinson, Barbara Metcalfe, Brannon Ingram and others, the introduction of print in the early eighteenth century enlarged and popularised the discursive space of religious authority and encouraged a more local and spatial understanding of religious identity. However, the discussions on Islam and print in South Asia to date have focused predominantly on Urdu printed texts, on matters of Islamic jurisprudence, 'ulama or elite individuals and groups, and Islam's relationship to Hinduism, colonialism and nationalism. Both workshops helped to widen scope of earlier scholarship to focus on texts on a range of matters, in different vernaculars, not limited to, but including: Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Dobhashi (Bangla Musulmani), Muslim Mapilla, Sindhi and Pashto. The panels included: •Arabic printing in India, translation, and the transregional reach of print between the Middle East and South Asia; •Print and Multilingual religious expression in South Asian Islam; •Interactions between the Persianate and the vernacular in print; •Print and Performance: Theatre and Music in 19th century print culture. •The Social Spaces of the Vernacular •The Practicalities of Printing: A View from the Trade •The British Library Collections •The circulation of religious texts beyond the Subcontinent: from London to Mecca and Calcutta to Australia •Scandal, Gossip, and Songs
URL	https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/indian-print/2018/09/26/islam-and-print-in-south-asia-workshop-at-the-briti...

Description	Department for Business, Energy and lndustrial Strategy
Amount	£500,000 (GBP)
Organisation	Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy
Sector	Public
Country	United Kingdom
Start	03/2018
End	03/2019

Title	International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2017 & 2019 Bengali Optical Character Recognition competition
Description	The Digital Curator for the project submitted a successful proposal for a Bengali OCR challenge at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR2017) which the Two Centuries of Indian Print ran in collaboration with the University of Salford's PRIMA Research Lab.The project's Digital Curator is also continuing to work with various external partners, including Google, to explore Bengali OCR solutions. In March 2017 the project ream team launched a 'first of its kind' Optical Character Recognition for Bangla competition, run in collaboration with the University of Salford's PRIMA Research Lab as part of the 2017 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. The competition is thought to be the first objective comparative evaluation of OCR technologies for Bangla. 23 institutions from 7 countries registered for the competition and the results were announced during a special poster session at the conference in Kyoto, Japan, November 2017. The competition evaluated state-of-the-art tools and resulted in Google performing best. A written report summarising the competition will also be released through the project's Early Indian Printed Books online exhibition. We are continuing to work on OCR capabilities and launched ICDAR2019 - with more ground truth prepared and made available.
Type Of Material	Improvements to research infrastructure
Year Produced	2017
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	The impact of the project's Digital Curator initiating this OCR challenge at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition is a possible contribution to the development of OCR technology for Bengali script, which would represent a very positive outcome for the project.
URL	http://u-pat.org/ICDAR2017/CfP/cfp_v9_hq.pdf

Title	Project Led training sessions
Description	Our Digital Curator Tom Derrick has organised two OCR training sessions for the wider organisation: a Hack & Yack on 17th March with Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert where he will lead a training session for staff on how to use Transkribus and a OCR training day on 27th April, for staff as part of the Digital Scholarship Training Programme. This will provide a theoretical and practical introduction to OCR/HTR and its potential value for cultural heritage collections. During the day there will be a showcase of the development undertaken by 2CIP to improve OCR for Bengali.
Type Of Material	Improvements to research infrastructure
Year Produced	2020
Provided To Others?	No
Impact	This will help British Library staff to use the pronciples that the project has discovered to aid their own OCR work.

Title	Quarterly lists on BL.Labs
Description	The Two Centuries of Indian Print project at the British Library has digitised and made available searchable scans of its collection of bound volumes of Quarterly Lists. The Quarterly Lists are printed catalogue records of books published quarterly and by province in British India between 1867 and 1947. The catalogues are predominantly in English language with some Bengali and mostly arranged in table format, capturing descriptive metadata about the books, including the names and addresses of printers and publishers, the number of copies printed and often the price, as well as further information. The project is now making these lists available as ALTO XML files and will be digitising rare Bengali books dating from 1713-1914 in 2017, the datasets of which will also be made available through the BL Labs website: https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/ As well as this resource being available to download from the British Library's BL Labs page: https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/ the project has also produced Optical Character Recognition xml files, which are text-searchable for researchers, of the pre-1947 Quarterly Lists. Digital Curator is assessing and improving the quality where possible and once completed - these will be available freely online to the public.
Type Of Material	Improvements to research infrastructure
Year Produced	2016
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	The collection has been advertised and is being used by researchers globally on the BL labs dataset, which is a very valuable resource for digital research on South Asian book history, made available on-line for the first time.
URL	https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/

Title	"Quarterly Lists" Catalogue Records of Indian Printed Books
Description	The Two Centuries of Indian Print project at the British Library has digitised and made available searchable scans of its collection of bound volumes of Quarterly Lists. The Quarterly Lists are printed catalogue records of books published quarterly and by province in British India between 1867 and 1947. The catalogues are predominantly in English language with some Bengali and mostly arranged in table format, capturing descriptive metadata about the books, including the name and addresses of printers and publishers, the number of copies printed and often the price, as well as further information. The project has made these lists available as searchable PDFs and ALTO XML files. The project has also digitised rare Bengali books dating from 1713-1914 which will be made available as a dataset along with full text transcriptions of the books. These will be available freely online to the public
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2017
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	The collection has been advertised and is being used by researchers globally. This dataset represents a valuable research tool for digital research into the history of the book trade in South Asia. It is the first time that searchable scans of this material have been made available on-line, and this data will permit researchers to formulate novel research questions about the subject matter contained in the Quarterly Lists.
URL	https://bl.iro.bl.uk/work/ns/8de070f6-bb21-4d3f-89de-7c3930934d2f

Title	"Quarterly Lists" Catalogue Records of Indian Printed Books - on BL labs
Description	The Two Centuries of Indian Print project at the British Library has digitised and made available searchable scans of its collection of bound volumes of Quarterly Lists. The Quarterly Lists are printed catalogue records of books published quarterly and by province in British India between 1867 and 1947. The catalogues are predominantly in English language with some Bengali and mostly arranged in table format, capturing descriptive metadata about the books, including the name and addresses of printers and publishers, the number of copies printed and often the price, as well as further information. The project is also making these lists available as ALTO XML files and will be digitising rare Bengali books dating from 1713-1914 in 2017, the datasets of which will also be made available through the BL Labs website: https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/ As well as this resource being available to download from the British Library's BL Labs page: https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/ the project has also produced Optical Character Recognition xml files, which are text-searchable for researchers, of the pre-1947 Quarterly Lists. Digital Curator is assessing and improving the quality where possible and once completed - these will be available freely online to the public.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2017
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	The collection has been advertised and is being used by researchers globally. This dataset represents a valuable research tool for digital research into the history of the book trade in South Asia. It is the first time that searchable scans of this material have been made available on-line, and this data will permit researchers to formulate novel research questions about the subject matter contained in the Quarterly Lists.
URL	https://data.bl.uk/twocenturies-quarterlylists/

Title	Ground Truth transcriptions for training OCR of historical Bengali printed texts - Recognition of Early Indian Printed Documents competition
Description	This dataset comprises 81 digitised images (TIFF files) drawn from a selection of early printed Bengali books (1713-1914) digitised through the Two Centuries of Indian Print project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print). Also contained are ground truth transcriptions (XML) for each page that can be used for training optical character recognition software on historical Bengali printed text. The folder contains the images and ground truth used for the REID2019 competition (https://www.primaresearch.org/REID2019/), part of ICDAR 2019 (https://icdar2019.org/competitions-2/). The images are out of copyright and the transcriptions are also public domain.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2019
Provided To Others?	Yes
URL	https://bl.iro.bl.uk/work/6fecbd34-44d9-4006-83fa-9113751f8f18

Title	Ground Truth transcriptions for training OCR of historical Bengali printed texts - Recognition of Early Indian Printed Documents competition - updated with improved XML coordinates
Description	This dataset comprises 81 digitised images (TIFF files) drawn from a selection of early printed Bengali books (1713-1914) digitised through the Two Centuries of Indian Print project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print). Also contained are ground truth transcriptions (XML) for each page that can be used for training optical character recognition software on historical Bengali printed text. The folder contains the images and ground truth used for the REID2019 competition (https://www.primaresearch.org/REID2019/), part of ICDAR 2019 (https://icdar2019.org/competitions-2/). The images are out of copyright and the transcriptions are also public domain. This dataset is an updated version of Ground Truth transcriptions for training OCR of historical Bengali printed texts - Recognition of Early Indian Printed Documents competition with 48 xml files updated with more accurate text line coordinates.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2020
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	The transcriptions in this dataset have been used to train the text recognition tool, Transkribus to automate recognition of printed Bangla. The Two Centuries of Indian Print project team are currently using this tool to automate recognition of all Bengali books digitised and catalogued by the project.
URL	https://bl.iro.bl.uk/work/bb125e50-4a09-46e8-904b-6e46cf308d91

Title	Ground Truth transcriptions for training OCR of historical Bengali printed texts - Transkribus
Description	This dataset comprises 74 digitised images (TIFF files) drawn from a selection of early printed Bengali books (1713-1914) digitised through the Two Centuries of Indian Print project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print). Also contained are ground truth transcriptions (XML) for each page that can be used for training optical character recognition software on historical Bengali printed text. The folder contains images and ground truth used to train Transkribus. The images are out of copyright and the transcriptions are also public domain.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2019
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	The transcriptions in this dataset have been used to train the text recognition tool, Transkribus to automate recognition of printed Bangla. The Two Centuries of Indian Print project team are currently using this tool to automate recognition of all Bengali books digitised and catalogued by the project.
URL	https://bl.iro.bl.uk/work/6694175f-e489-4f9e-bcdd-3058f5e0aa23

Title	Transkribus for automated text recognition of historical Bengali Books
Description	As part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, Tom Derrick -our Digital Curator has been working on solutions to automate text recognition of early printed Bengali books. He has recently been using Transkribus for automated text recognition of Bengali printed books. Transkribus is a READ project and available as a free tool for users who want to automate recognition of historical documents. The British Library has already had some success using Transkribus on manuscripts from our India Office collection, and this inspired him to see how it would perform on printed Bengali texts, which provides an altogether different type of challenge. It has the potential to help 'unlock' keyword searching and text mining in digitised printed collections. Although Transkribus is most commonly used for automated recognition of handwritten texts, Tom found it also worked fairly well for printed texts too, including printed texts in Indian scripts. He tested it with a training set of 50 pages from the British Library's 19th century printed books written in Bengali script that have been digitised through the project.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2018
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	Our digital Curator is now working to get more transcriptions done, as the accuracy of the OCR will be vastly improved by creating more transcriptions and re-training the Transkribus recognition engine - and may be the key to unlocking automated text recognition for not only Bengali but, in time, other South Asian languages.
URL	https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus/#archive-content

Title	Two Centuries of Indian print - Catalogue records
Description	The project will make a significant contribution to the British Library Catalogue records for early Bengali, Assamese, Sylheti, Urdu and wider South Asian printed material. Some of the items to be digitised will already have metadata in British Library or SOAS systems, as there are c. 13,500 basic bibliographic records for Bengali books in the British Library collection. However, some items will not have catalogue records and some will have only basic records which will require enhancement before they can be ingested into the British Library systems and linked to the scanned image, or before they are used for digital humanities analysis. The project core digitisation of 1,000 unique and rare books will have enhanced records giving information such as illustrations, dimensions and subject areas. The project plans to catalogue many more items that have been scanned, through the project team and through external fundraising. This will be a huge tranche of work in cataloguing historical South Asian material.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2017
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	Creating and enhancing catalogue records as part of this project will be a huge and valuable resource for the British Library and historical collections, aswell as being very valuable for the project team and wider researchers who could explore how these bibliographic records might be combined, and analysed, and how they might, if visualised both temporally and spatially on historical maps, allow researchers to pose and answer new questions in the field of South Asian book history. This will be valuable to the field of Digital Humanities in South Asian Studies, with a view towards developing new models for the provision of such digital materials, and especially in support of large scale analysis.
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/collection-items

Title	Two Centuries of Indian print - Scanned images
Description	This project has major academic impact through its online collection of digitised images. Researchers throughout the world are now able to search and access the images of the unique early printed Bengali titles that have been digitised for the project through the scanned images made available online. Digitising and making Bengali books freely available online opens up access to this important collection for scholars, but also encourages new accessibility of the collection to a more general audience, leading to further interest in the field of Bengali book history, trade, and printing as well as, more broadly, in South Asian cultural and intellectual history. We have scanned & ingested 1600 early printed and rare books, a 'stretch target' of early printed Bengali Books, and scanned a further batch of Vernacular Tracts in a number of South Asian languages. We have also scanned a related strand of the project - the Quarterly lists - which are printed catalogue records of Indian books published quarterly and by province of British India between 1867 and 1947. This together represents a vast number of images (1,683,420) which will be invaluable for researchers, scholars and people nationally and internationally. Digitising and making Bengali books freely available online would not only open up access to this important collection, but will also encourage new accessibility of the collection, leading to further research in the field of Bengali book history, trade, and printing as well as, more broadly, in South Asian cultural and intellectual history.
Type Of Material	Database/Collection of data
Year Produced	2017
Provided To Others?	Yes
Impact	Digitising and making Bengali books freely available online would not only open up access to this important collection, but will also encourage new accessibility of the collection, leading to further research in the field of Bengali book history, trade, and printing as well as, more broadly, in South Asian cultural and intellectual history. It will be very valuable to the field of Digital Humanities in South Asian Studies, with a view towards developing new models for the provision of such digital materials, and especially in support of large scale analysis.
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/collection-items

Description	Jadavpur University
Organisation	Jadavpur University
Country	India
Sector	Academic/University
PI Contribution	Continuing collaboration with partners at Jadavpur University, who regularly contribute towards the 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' project with research and book history queries. Research fellows from the University have contributed to metadata creation for digitised items from the project to help with the cataloguing process overseen by the Project Curator. They have also been working closely with the Digital Curator using Trankribus software to carryout OCR text detection. This continued work on the 2CIP project was carried out whilst engaging in joint ventures that supported the 'India 75 Events' programme, where we worked together with the Jadavpur project partner and fellows on the online hybrid conference held at Jadavpur complementing the 'Unearthing the South Asia Collections' Research Seminar Series for the events programme.
Collaborator Contribution	Our partners Jadavpur University held a hybrid conference (in-person at Jadavpur and online for international attendees) on 17 November 2022: 'Old Books New Histories - Exploring Early Printed Texts'. An open call for proposals was held in advance of this conference. The Research Fellows prepared a paper on their experiences of working on the 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' project, bringing further awareness of the digitised material made available through this project.
Impact	The longstanding and fruitful partnership with our project partners in Jadavpur University has resulted in a number of outputs: - Development of OCR technologies and text detection related to South Asian languages and scripts. - Furthering research and supporting academic engagement with the digitised material from the 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' project. - Providing a platform for emerging scholars contributing to original research in the field of South Asian early print histories. - Making digitised collections discoverable through supporting creation of metadata.
Start Year	2022

Description	Jadavpur University
Organisation	Jadavpur University
Country	India
Sector	Academic/University
PI Contribution	Continuing collaboration with partners at Jadavpur University, who regularly contribute towards the project with research and book history queries. Specifically this year they have contributed to the planning and delivery of our first of three Digital Workshops held at Jadavpur University on December 7th 2016.
Collaborator Contribution	Our partners at Jadavpur University regularly contribute towards the project. They specifically contribute with research on Bengali book history, and the post-doctoral researcher based at Jadavpur who is associated with the project works closely with our Digital and Project curator on book history and selection queries. Our partners also contribute to the project website content, and guidance and support in organising digitisation workshops and academic conferences associated with the project in India and the July, 2017 conference on South Asian book history that is planned to take place at Jadavpur University. Jadavpur University were key to planning and executing the project's first Digital Skill Sharing Workshop held at Jadavpur in December of 2016, by contributing staff time and organisation, the venue, administrative and other incidental costs associated with workshop. The Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University contributed by delivering a keynote speech and presentation on the day on the Endangered Archives Projects that have taken place at Jadavpur University. The workshop was attended by 27 library and information professionals from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions in Kolkata. Our partners at Jadavpur University were also key in planning and executing the project's second Digital workshops which took place on 13th July 2017 at Jadavpur University. This workshop explored state-of-the-art advancements in digital technology for Optical Character Recognition for Bangla. Experts from South Asia and the British Library communicated the latest developments in OCR technology. Participants from 10 cultural institutions in India and the United States also learned new OCR software that can be used for their own material. Jadavpur were also key in the organisation of the co-organisation of a two-day academic symposium at Jadavpur University on South Asian Book History (14-15 July 2017) entitled, 'The Book Unbound: Two Centuries of Indian Print'. Our Co-Investigator and postdoctoral researchers based at Jadavpur University invited researchers, scholars and practitioners from the UK, India, Bangladesh and Nepal, provided materials to promote the conference, such as bespoke art work and informational fliers, and facilities for the conference. Our partners at Jadavpur also organised accommodation, flights and meals for the speakers. There were 25 speakers, of which one gave a keynote speech, 20 presented research papers and 4 participated in a roundtable discussion. The symposium covered a wide range of issues and subjects, which included grammar and typography in early printed books; the history of print-house practices and their personnel; identity and print; print and the public sphere; individual works and authors in the Age of Reproduction; topographies of print; digital expressions of South Asian print and preservation of print in the digital era. The academic symposium was advertised widely, within the scholarly community and public, in the UK and South Asia on the Two Centuries of Indian Print website, twitter and facebook. The talk was attended by over 150-200 people, and was covered in national media (online and print) in India such as the South Asian Times, and the Millennium Post. Plans are in train to have a publication arising from this Symposium, and videos have been uploaded onto the project web space. (Organised by Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin, Co-Investigator Prof Abhijit Gupta, Co-Investigator Dr Padmini Ray-Murray, Digital Curator Tom Derrick, Project Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu and Project Manager Alia Carter). Co-Investigator Professor Abhijit Gupta also joined the South Asia team for a research fellowship hosted at the library between 8-29 October, 2018. A paragraph below summarises his work during his time with us: "Professor Gupta has been a long-standing research collaborator of the library's Two Centuries of Indian Print project, and has given his expertise and support as Co-Investigator to both Phase 1 (2016-2018) and Phase 2 (2018-2019) of the project. The Two Centuries of Indian Print project hosted Prof Gupta for a fellowship at the library in order to facilitate his research on the library's collection of early printed Bengali texts, allow him to collaborate more closely and guide the work of the researchers in the Two Centuries of Indian Print London team including identifying more unique titles within the scans, and present his research in the Two Centuries of Indian Print workshop taking place on the 26th of October, on Islam and Print in South Asia. Papers delivered in the workshop will be published as a special edition journal."
Impact	Through this collabaration we have been able to select the unique and rare books that form the backbone part of this project, as well as continuing support and guidance on research into book history in South Asia. Through this collaboration we have planned and delivered the first two of our Digital Skill Sharing Workshops, and the organisation of the co-organised two day Academic Symposium 'The Book Unbound: Two Centuries of Indian Print'.
Start Year	2016

Description	National Digital Library (India)
Organisation	National Digital Library
Country	India
Sector	Public
PI Contribution	The British Library signed an MOU with the National Digital Library in India to share metadata and digitised content so that it can be hosted on their website.
Collaborator Contribution	The British Library signed an MOU with the National Digital Library in India to share metadata and digitised content so that it can be hosted on their website.
Impact	The British Library signed an MOU with the National Digital Library in India to share metadata and digitised content so that it can be hosted on their website, we are still exploring how this will work.
Start Year	2016

Description	National Library of India Skills Exchange
Organisation	National Library of India
Country	India
Sector	Charity/Non Profit
PI Contribution	The British Library signed an agreement with the National Library of India to undertake a programme of collaborative training workshops and work placements during the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project to foster skill sharing and professional links between library professionals in the UK and India. This consisted of: • an initial exploratory meeting, • two 1 week workshops bringing Indian library staff to the UK to foster skills sharing The initial exploratory visit to discuss this proposal took place on 22-23rd September 2016 in the UK. Representatives from the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India were in attendance, namely; Mr Shri Pankaj Rag, Joint Secretary (Library), Mission Director of National Mission on Libraries and Ms Deepika Pokharna, Director (Library). The National Library of India was represented by Dr Arun Kumar Chakraborty, Director General. The purpose of the visit was: (a) To share expertise across a range of priority areas, and enable Indian colleagues to gain understanding of the British Library and its strategic priorities and projects, as well as some key operational areas (b) To finalise plans for workshops to be held later in the year to foster skill sharing and professional links between library professionals in the UK and India.
Collaborator Contribution	The National Library of India selected and financed the initial exploratory meeting to discuss the setting up of the Skills-Exchange programme. Two Skills Exchange Programmes were then organised with the National Library of India to engage and promote capacity-building and skills-sharing elements between the two institutions. These programmes took place in September and November and were each five days in length. The programmes were match funded by the National Library of India; the NLI covered the cost of the Indian visa and travel costs, accommodation, and living expenses. Our contribution was the organisation of two five-day programmes providing presentations and tours led by staff members across all departments of the British Library, including staff based in London and York; and project team staff time in contributing to each programme and accompanying the visitors throughout their week at the British Library. 50 British Library staff members contributed to each programme and each programme included 17 hours' worth of presentations with 8 hours of tours. Feedback was excellent, with many learning experiences that were mutually beneficial. The participants were interested in the digitisation process of the project and how it enabled online access to the digitised material which was a great opportunity for users around the world, they showed great interest in the operating systems in use at the Library such as the methods in which books are ordered by readers, the E Legal Deposit departments and collections metadata, the conservation of different materials and textiles - with participants expressing a wish to collaborate with the British Library in organising a conservation workshop in India. One official commented that he felt "upgraded with innovative ideas" after receiving these presentations and all of the officials on both Programmes expressed a serious wish to collaborate in the digitisation of Indian material, mainly in relation to early printed Indian books and India Office Records, as they all felt that having this information accessible online would greatly enhance Indian research.
Impact	The British Library hosted representatives from the Indian Ministry of Culture, and the Director General of the National Library of India in an initial exploratory meeting, and then hosted 10 mid-career librarians to spend a week in the UK (in two blocks of 5 participants). They participated and engaged with a packed programme of talks from all areas of the Library and a day at the Boston Spa site. Feedback was excellent, with many learning experiences that were mutually beneficial.
Start Year	2016

Description	Padmini Ray Murray (previously Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology)
Organisation	University of Oxford
Department	Digital Humanities
Country	United Kingdom
Sector	Academic/University
PI Contribution	The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of specialists in digital curating, data analysis and the digital humanities as well as in the history of the languages and scripts of South Asia.
Collaborator Contribution	Our Co-investigator at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology is an experts in the digital humanities and forming research questions around the historical analysis of data sets with a particular specialism in both Bengali book history and the application of digital humanities methods to South Asian studies. We are working closely with our Co-investigator at the Srishti Institute on historical analysis of South Asian language data sets, geo-referencing, and Bengali book history, and have been able to share digitised data sets as we create them and make them available on-line. We have worked with our co-investigator to deliver four digital workshops and for the content of the website, and in January 2018 the fourth digital skills workshop was held at a conference run by Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, entitled, 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn'. The topic of the conference considered how digital technology might be effectively used to increase engagement, reach and access - focussing on community archiving, cultural heritage and memory institutions, exhibition design, and Indian cultural and linguistic content, encouraging open standards and interoperability. The second day was on use of videogames and new media in the cultural heritage space. Our Digital Curator Tom Derrick presented on the digital research achievements of the project and took part in a workshop addressing interoperable standards applied to collections of Indian heritage. It was attended by about 50-60 people, mostly Srishti students of mixed media, as well as a dozen or so speakers, many of whom were not academics, but rather technologists whose work intersects with cultural heritage. Co-Investigator Dr Padmini Ray Murray also joined the team from India in a personal capacity for a research fellowship hosted at the library between 7 Jan - 1st Feb 2019. She worked with the Digital Scholarship team (and Digital Curator Tom Derrick) on further ideas and explorations of the digital humanities side of the project. Out of the placement came some good ideas for developing the Early Indian Printed Books website into a teaching resource to include image galleries and new pathways into the digitised collection. Plans have also been put in place for new OCR evaluation of different typographies to help prioritise books for OCR. Padmini was also able to meet with other library staff including Antonia Moon to investigate material in the India Office collection to support research into the book trade, particularly movement from Britain to India of printing presses. Plans were also developed with the Oxford Visual Geometry group to use their machine learning tools to trace instances of woodcuts and print ornaments within our digitised South Asian collections.
Impact	Our Co-investigator at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology has specialised in both Bengali book history and the application of digital humanities methods to South Asian studies. We have worked with our Co-Investigator to deliver four digital skill sharing workshops and for the content of the website, and in January 2018 the fourth digital skills workshop was held at a conference run by Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology on 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn'.
Start Year	2016

Description	Roja Muthiah Research Library
Organisation	Roja Muthiah Research Library
Country	India
Sector	Public
PI Contribution	The British Library recently signed an MOU with Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai to potentially facilitate a cataloguing partnership with them on the Vernacular Tracts that cover all South Asian languages.
Collaborator Contribution	The British Library recently signed an MOU with Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai to potentially facilitate a cataloguing partnership with them on the Vernacular Tracts that cover all South Asian languages.
Impact	Still exploring.
Start Year	2016

Description	SOAS
Organisation	School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)
Country	United Kingdom
Sector	Academic/University
PI Contribution	SOAS were a key partner for us, and held some of the books that fell within Phase 1 of our project. We worked closely with SOAS on their selection of books for digitisation. From April 2017 - to April 2018 we used a shared cataloguer with SOAS who worked in both locations to identify books that come under the project, cataloguing the ones that come under the unique and rare selection.
Collaborator Contribution	The SOAS Subject Librarian for South Asia and Development Studies) was a Co-Investigator for the project and worked on the metadata and digitisation elements of Phase 1 of the project, bringing expertise about how academic researchers use the SOAS collection. She searched and investigated relevant material in the SOAS collections, and worked closely with the project team to make sure these are selected and digitised as well as participating in supervising the work of the project's cataloguer. We went on to collaborate on a more research based partnership, inviting students from particular interests and areas of study in South Asia to engage with our expert project curators and view the collections. Since 2018 we have also contributed many blogs to their dedication web space on the project.
Impact	SOAS library identified a selection of their rare and unique Bengali books to digitise, these have now been brought over for scanning, and digital copies have been given to SOAS to put on their portal for the project. A link is established between our webspace and their catalogues.
Start Year	2016

Description	Skills and Knowledge exchange
Organisation	Jadavpur University
Country	India
Sector	Academic/University
PI Contribution	The team have offered training and are working closely with the partners to ensure accurate creation of metadata and OCR.
Collaborator Contribution	Research fellows are contributing to skills and knowledge exchange in digital humanities by processing books for OCR and contributing to cataloguing and metadata creation.
Impact	Fully catalogued and published records for approximately Bengali books and processing OCR for approximately 1,168 books.
Start Year	2021

Description	'Old Books New Histories - Exploring Early Printed Texts'. Jadavpur University Hybrid Conference on 17 November 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Our partners Jadavpur University held a hybrid conference (in-person at Jadavpur and online for international attendees) on 17 November 2022: 'Old Books New Histories - Exploring Early Printed Texts'. An open call for proposals was held in advance of this conference as well. In this way, both South Asian and British scholars had the opportunity to present their research either at the British Library or at Jadavpur University in November. It was well attended both in person and online and well received.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NXWb2eCuPA

Description	Academic Symposium
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	On 14th and 15th July 2017, the project organised a two-day academic symposium at Jadavpur University on South Asian Book History, inviting researchers, scholars and practitioners from UK, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The symposium was co-organised by the British Library Two Centuries of Indian Print team and our partner institute in Kolkata, India, The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, with the contribution of our Co-Investigator and Post-doctoral researcher in Jadavpur. The symposium featured 25 speakers, of which 1 gave a keynote speech, 20 presented research papers and 4 participated in a roundtable discussion. The symposium covered a wide-range of issues and subjects, including grammar and typography in early printed books; print-house practices and personnel; identity and print; print and the public sphere; solo works/authors in the Age of Reproduction; topographies of print; digital expressions of South Asian print and preservation of print in the digital era. The academic symposium was advertised widely, within the scholarly community and public, in the UK and South Asia on the Two Centuries of Indian Print website, twitter and facebook. The talk was attended by over 150-200 people, and was covered in national media (online and print) in India such as the South Asian Times, and the Millennium Post. A complete list of speakers, panels and the poster for the symposium is available on our project website.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	BBC 3 podcast delivery 'Arts and Ideas' 17 June 2022. Promotion of Two Centuries of Indian Print project.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Media (as a channel to the public)
Results and Impact	The podcast was very well received and it successfully promoted the British Library collections, India 75 Events programme and Two Centuries of Indian Print project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Blogpost: A Guide to Early Printed Urdu books digitised by Two Centuries of Indian Print.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Promotion of Two Centuries of Indian Print project British Library collections
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/articles/a-guide-to-early-urdu-printed-books

Description	Blogpost: Two Centuries of Indian Print Seminar Series at the British Library.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Promotion of British Library collections and Two Centuries of Indian Print project British Library activities.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021
URL	https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2021/12/two-centuries-of-indian-print.html

Description	Blogs, articles and other content
Form Of Engagement Activity	Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	A dedicated space on the British Library's website (www.bl.uk) has been created for the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. As well as hosting the digitised items themselves; as part of this web space, the Project Curator , Digital Curator and Post-doctoral researcher have gathered or written 19 blogs and articles about the collection items that are part of the project, providing a historical context to the digitised material, explaining the project and its research questions and outcomes. We also have blogs and content detailing progress on digitisation, learning material from our capacity-building and Digital Workshops in the UK and in South Asia, and videos of our two day academic symposium on the web space. We are actively soliciting more articles to be written in addition to these that will encompass both the digital and academic research topics relevant to the project. We have delivered 62 seminars in our South Asian seminar series between 2016 and 2019 to sold out audiences and also uploaded 46 podcasts from our very popular Soundcloud on our project's web space. These podcasts will complement our other digital humanities elements like visual data mapping. We've had more than 30,000 views since the website launched with the articles the most popular pages and with most people finding their way to our website through Google: https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books. Most of the views have been to the collection items and articles with a healthy spread of views to all the main pages of this online resource. Number of podcast views: The 46 podcasts freely available to listen to on the British Library's Sound Cloud page have just under 11,000 plays and 81 likes since the first went live in March 2017. 'Forgotten Music And Muted Women' has received the most listens, it has been listened to 871 times online. The project's Twitter account has 3000 Followers, and a total of 5500 tweets have been posted.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2017,2018
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books

Description	Building links with cultural institutions across the UK/Global
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact	The team held a number of talks and engagement activities with stakeholders and third parties in the UK, Europe, South Asia and the US between Dec 2016-March 19. So far, they have been involved in 28 research presentations including: presenting talks in the UK at SOAS, Bodleian Library, Oxford UK, Senate House London, Birmingham City University, UK; internationally at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum in Delhi, Freie Universität, Berlin, Maulana Bhashani Foundation, New York , Lahore University of Management Sciences; presenting at festivals and conferences - including Lahore Literary Festival, Lahore Afkaar-e-Taza festival, Jaipur Literature Festival, 5th International Congress of Bengal Studies, 23rd March Association for Asian Studies conference (Washington), Dublin, Michigan, Harvard, "InterAsian Connections VI" in Hanoi, at the Univercidad Nacional De San Martin, Argentina, and took part in panel talks at the International Conference on Digital Libraries in Delhi which were attended by more than 50 delegates and live streamed around the world and the Transkribus Users conference at the Technical University of Vienna. The team also built links and met with other cultural institutions while in India and Bangladesh including, the Bengal State Archives, Sreerampore Public Library, the Minister of Culture in Bangladesh, the Bangla Academy, Asiatic Society of Bengal Library, Dhaka University Library, National Library and the Archives, and the British Council.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2018

Description	Collection item show and tell
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Supporters
Results and Impact	The project team continued to hold sessions to introduce the South Asian collections items from the British Library. The project has hosted 29 official visits, hosting diverse groups such as from the British Government, 9 Indian MPs as part of the 2016 Chevening Parliamentarians' Fellowship Programme, the Bangladesh Cultural Minister, Cultural Ministry of Bangladesh, the Indian High Commissioner, the curator of the new South Asia galleries at the Manchester Museum, a group of Chevening South Asia journalists, the Director of the Rajasthan State Archives and various philanthropic engagement - including with the British Asian Trust.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2018

Description	Community Engagement Workshop on 'Punjabi Folktales'.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The community Engagement Workshop on 'Punjabi Folktales' was the first of three community events that are part of the 'India 75 Events' programme and it was attended by members from community group 'Punjab Azaad' and Derby museum. A Show and Tell was followed by a discussion workshop. The workshop was very well received and members were engaged with the collections. Participants were new to the Library and the collections, and after the workshop many became active members of the Library, having been inspired to start researching the South Asia collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/articles/india-75-events-programme-punjabi-legends-and-...

Description	Community Engagement Workshop on 'Treasures of the Malayalam Collections'.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The third and final Community Engagement Workshop as part of India 75 Events was on the 'Treasures of the Malayalam Collections' attended by members from community group 'Kerala Arts and Literary Association' and the 'Malayalee Association'. A Show and Tell was followed by a discussion workshop. Members from the Kerala Arts and Literary Association and the Malayalee Association got in touch with us from the webpage, as they were interested to be involved. This session covered 'Treasures of the Malayalam' collections and the discussions were very much centred around the history and the use of the Malayalam language today. The community groups received the workshop with enthusiasm and focused on developing the relationship through discussing future potential events related to bringing more awareness and engagement with the communities and collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Community Engagement Workshop on 'Urdu Poetry'.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The second Community Engagement Workshop on 'Urdu Poetry' was attended by members from community group Faiz Cultural Academy. A Show and Tell was followed by a discussion workshop. This workshop focused on the Urdu collections in particular the 'Urdu Ghazal before and after 1857.' Members of the Faiz Cultural Academy, an organisation named after the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, were invited to attend the workshop and take part in the focused discussions. This workshop was repeated for the Pakistan Society, who requested a private workshop for their members.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/articles/india-75-events-programme-the-urdu-ghazal-befo...

Description	Community Event - 'Celebration day for the Declaration of Bangladeshi Independence'
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	Regional
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin participated in an Celebration day for the Declaration of Bangladeshi Independence' showcasing 2CIP material. This was a joint event between the British Library and Camden Council for local residents.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Community engagement workshops
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	Local
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	The Two Centuries of Indian Print project hosts regular visits from grass-roots organisations from South Asian diaspora communities to discuss the project and Bengali and wider South Asian collections; the purpose of these visits to make our collections accessible to a wider range of audiences and communicate the relevance of the British Library's collection and the Two Centuries project to the cultural heritage of diaspora groups. The project has delivered 9 Community Outreach Events so far for a range of community groups and local people, and welcomed numerous groups to the library, numbering at least 100 individuals from these groups who have engaged directly with the Bengali collections and the project. Some examples are: the Somerstown festival (July and November, 2016) distributing promotional material for the Two Centuries of Indian Print collection and the wider South Asian section and a successful event organized in conjunction with the Community Engagement Manager and Age UK Camden, at the British Library, with presentations from the project team (project curator, the Endangered Archives Programme, with Bengali cuisine, a pop up archive of Bengali posters (from BL's Endangered Archives Programme digitised material), and classical dance, music and food. The event was very successful with over 250 members of the public, primarily from the Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK, welcomed into the library and acquainted with our Bengali collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2018

Description	Community event 'Once Upon a River: Folksongs and Poetry, beyond Punjab's borders' took place on 4 February 2023.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Show and Tell and Performance. The session was very well received and requests were made for more such future events.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2023
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/once-upon-a-river-folksongs-and-poetry-beyond-punjabs-borders

Description	Community taster session Show and Tell on 'Punjabi folktales' on 12 July 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Local community groups were invited specifically to engage with collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Community taster session Show and Tell on 'Urdu Literature and Cinema, an Enduring Romance, Bollywood, Lollywood and more' on 3 May 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Local community groups were invited specifically to engage with collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Community workshop for the Pakistan Society on 18 October 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Local community groups were invited specifically to engage with collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Conference "Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics: Aspirations, Dreams, and Critique" Conference", University of Cambridge 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr. Layli Uddin presented a paper and was a discussant of two papers at conference "Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics: Aspirations, Dreams, and Critique" Conference", University of Cambridge, 14-16th September 2018. Her paper is on "Maulana Bhashani: The making of a modern king."
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Delivery of conference paper on Bengali and Urdu OCR by Tom Derrick and Nicole Merkel-Hilf from University of Heidelberg at Trankribus User Conference in Innsbruck on 30 September 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Engaging global audiences in promotion of OCR achievements and British Library collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Digital Workshop: Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn in India; Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	The project held its fourth digital skills workshop at a conference entitled: 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn in India' held at Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in January 2018. The topic of the conference considered how digital technology might be effectively used to increase engagement, reach and access - focussing on community archiving, cultural heritage and memory institutions, exhibition design, and Indian cultural and linguistic content, encouraging open standards and interoperability. The second day was on use of videogames and new media in the cultural heritage space. It was attended by about 50-60 people, mostly Srishti students of mixed media, as well as a dozen or so speakers, many of whom were not academics, but rather technologists whose work intersects with cultural heritage.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018
URL	https://www.facebook.com/events/159005181394069/

Description	Engagement and dialogue: Lahore Literary Festival inaugral event
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Industry/Business
Results and Impact	Principal Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan attended the Lahore Literary Festival inaugural event at the Pakistani High Commission and met the High Commissioner, First Secretary and Second Secretary and discussed the possibility of collaborations with institutions in Pakistan, including with the Two Centuries of Indian Print project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Event hosted at the British Library for Bloomsbury Festival Trainees
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	Local
Primary Audience	Undergraduate students
Results and Impact	This event included a presentation on the British Library's South Asian Collections and a tour of the Library by Olivia Majumdar and Paramdip Khera.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Film Screening of Jago Hua Savera (1958), a restored Pakistani classic film on 23 October 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press)
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	For India 75 Events, the team organised three film screenings in the autumn of 2022. Due to the unavailability of the Library's Knowledge Centre, these took place in a local arthouse cinema, the Curzon Bloomsbury. The first film screening was Jago Hua Savera (1958), a restored neorealist classic of Pakistani cinema, that took place on October 23. It was attended by approximately sixty attendees and was very well received by the diverse audience comprised of South Asian community groups and local members of the public. Many audience members who attended this first screening attended the subsequent two screenings Court (2014) and 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) in the India 75 Events film screening series. All three screenings produced high levels of engagement from new audiences and requests for similar activities in the future.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/india-75-screening-jago-hua-savera

Description	Film screening of 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981), film produced by Aparna Sen on 10 December 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press)
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	As the final film screening, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1982) was shown on 10 December 2022. We were successful in securing the rights to screen the newly restored version of the film and this screening marked the first time the restored version of this classic film was shown in the United Kingdom. The screening was also attended by VIP guest Karan Kapoor, who had a short part in the film. The screening was preceded by a video interview with director and filmmaker Aparna Sen, interviewed by Dr Arani Ilankuberan and Dr Thea Buckley. The interview was supported with funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the video interview was recorded at the British Library when Ms. Sen was visiting the UK in July 2022. This was very well received and was the best attended screening, attended by approximately 100 -130 attendees of South Asian community groups and local audiences.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/india-75-film-screening-36-chowringhee-lane

Description	Film screening of Court (2014), a modern Marathi independent film on 3 December 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press)
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Court (2014), an example of contemporary Indian independent filmmaking, was the second film in the film screening series shown to a diverse audience of approximately 60 members made up of South Asian community groups, film enthusiasts and local audiences. The film was very well received and the film screenings were also an opportunity to work with new partners, as we licenced Court from an independent film company Day for Night, who own the UK screening rights to a number of interesting and significant Asian films of the last decade, and whose founder also runs Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival. We are planning to continue collaborating with Day for Night on future events and screenings.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/Film%20Screening%20Court

Description	International Library Leaders Programme at British Library, 19 July 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Promotion of British Library collections and Two Centuries of Indian Print project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Launch event: Journal Critical Muslim - CM28
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	The Journal Critical Muslim launched its latest issue - CM28: Narratives at The British Library on October 29th 2018 with a panel discussion of the topics features in the new edition of the journal. Our Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan was one of the showcasing contributors with Nicholas Masterton (Forensic Architecture), Shanon Shah (King's College, London) and Shazia Mirza. Critical Muslim is a unique quarterly publication of ideas and issues showcasing ground-breaking thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a rapidly changing, interconnected world. Co-organised by Samia Rahman (CM), Shannon Shah (CM), and Dr Nur Sobers-Khan (BL).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Launch of 2nd competition, at ICDAR 2019, for automated text recognition of rare and unique printed books written in Bangla
Form Of Engagement Activity	Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Following on from ICDAR2017 - the ICDAR2019 competition set by our Digital Curator Tom Derrick challenged participants to find an optimal solution for automating recognition of Bangla printed text. We have added more ground truth transcriptions for competition entrants to train their OCR systems with. This second competition encouraged submissions again from cutting-edge OCR methods leading to a solution that can truly open up these historic books, dating between 1713 and 1914, for text mining, enabling scholars of South Asian studies to explore hundreds of thousands of pages on a scale that has not been possible until now.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019
URL	http://icdar2019.org/

Description	Lectures delivered in South Asia Feb 2019
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator, Dr Priyanka Basu delivered lectures at Bankura University (Bengal), Gurudas College (Kolkata), Sanskrit College & University (Kolkata), and Shiv Nadar University (Delhi) where the faculty were keen on exposing the students to the 2CIP project. Did a half-an hour presentation each in these lectures taking the students through the 2CIP website and the collection items.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019

Description	Leeds Community Group presentations and workshop
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	Regional
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Olivia Majumdar and Paramdip Khera engaged with Community groups in Leeds delivering presentations about the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project and coordinated an interactive art workshop.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Media Activity
Form Of Engagement Activity	A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	The Two Centuries of Indian Print is of great significance to the British Library portfolio of projects, and as such the press office have been involved in compiling press releases to promote the project form inception and through to regular promotion of key stages and milestones. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy have held high profile visits which have had media activity related to it, and separately the project team and colleagues in India have had articles relating to the unique and rare material and of the historical context to the digitised material published. As a consequence of this we have had some approaches for BBC South Asia, BBC Radio 4 and other media outlets to discuss doing wider programmes and features, including our Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin interviewed by Community Events team member Amber Perrier on Resonance FM radio on 'Heritage at 'World in London.' During 2018, as a result of our two day academic conference at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata we had a number of articles published in South Asian newspapers, including South Asian Times, and the Millennium Post. As a consequence of this we have had some approaches from members of the public, scholars and press : including: BBC South Asia, BBC Radio 4, Resonance FM London (on our community work with the South Asian Diaspora in London) and other media outlets to discuss doing wider programmes and features.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2017,2018

Description	National Libraries Now Conference
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Tom Derrick and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert contributed to a panel presenting on the project's emerging technologies and collaborations.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	On-line seminar with Emory Professor Scott Kugle on 'Mah Laqa Bai' and the manuscript 'Divan-e- Chanda'.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	South Asian community groups, local audiences, scholars of South Asian studies and the general public attended this talk. It was very well received with calls for more such future events.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Panel : British Library - Islam and Print in South Asia Workshop (Part 1)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr. Layli Uddin presented a paper at the British Library - Islam and Print in South Asia Workshop (Part 1) on the 28th Sept: 'Muslim Migrants, Music and Print'. Our Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin, Project researcher/Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu and Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan also all chaired panels during the day.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel : Jaipur Literature Festival 9-10 June 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin was an 'Islam and Modernity' panel member at the Jaipur Literature Festival 9-10 June 2018 (BL)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel : SOAS South Asia Institute, University of London conference 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Cataloguer/researcher Dr Priyanka Basu, presented on a panel and performed at the SOAS South Asia Institute, University of London conference on: 'Approaching South Asia: Challenges, Connections and Creativity' -29 June 2018;
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel : University of Pennsylvania, US on "Unstable archives in South Asia: gender, digital history and what to do with things" 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr. Layli Uddin presented at a conference at University of Pennsylvania, US on "Unstable archives in South Asia: gender, digital history and what to do with things", 8th September 2018. Her talk entitled, "Dangerous archives: looking for the Red Maulana in Bangladesh" was part of panel "Combatting archival erasures.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel member: 'Left politics in South Asia: Past, Present and Future' - University of Toronto-Mississauga
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our project curator Dr Layli Uddin, was a speaker on panel 'Trajectories of Maoism' at workshop titled 'Left politics in South Asia: Past, Present and Future' on the 26th March 2018. This was organised by The Centre for South Asian Civilisations and Politics, University of Toronto-Mississauga.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel member: Association for Asian Studies conference
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our project Curator Dr Layli Uddin was a panel member: at the Association for Asian Studies conference (Washington) participating in a panel on: 'South Asian Muslim Political Thinkers on Reform, Freedom and Resistance' on 23rd March 2018.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018
URL	http://www.asian-studies.org/Conferences/AAS-Annual-Conference/Conference-Menu/Conference-Home

Description	Panel organisation: Lahore Literature Festival at the British Library
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan organised a panel, "Exploring literary aesthetics in the multilingual environment of South Asia," with a focus on Persian Urdu, and Bengali in the Lahore Literature Festival taking place at the BL on the 20th of October, 2018. Speakers were Dr Arthur Dudney (Cambridge), Sahba Shayani (Oxford), Dr Richard Williams (SOAS) in conversation with Dr Nur Sobers-Khan (British Library).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel participation at the Heritage Now Festival in Lahore
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Principal Investigator for the project, Dr Nur Sobers-Khan, attended the Heritage Now Festival in Lahore (21-22 Oct), sponsored by the British Council, Walled City Authority of Lahore, and UNESCO, and participated in a panel discussion on 'Diversity of Cultural and Religious Expressions,' and discussed the Two Centuries of Indian Print project as a key example of digital preservation of rare collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017
URL	https://www.britishcouncil.pk/events/heritage-now-0

Description	Panel participation at the Lahore Literary Festival (British Library)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Various members of the team including Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin and Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan, and project Curator Dr Priyanka Basu participated in a panel on the BL's South Asia collections at the Lahore Literary Festival held at the British Library UK, in 2017, 2018, 2019 with presentations of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project with other curators from across the Library.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017,2018,2019
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/lahore-literary-festival

Description	Panel participation: BFI screening of the documentary film: A Journey Worth 70 Years, with British Council Pakistan
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our Principal Investigator - Dr Nur Sobers-Khan took part in an expert discussion panel at the BFI screening of the documentary film "A Journey Worth 70 Years," with British Council Pakistan.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Panel participation: India Gazette London magazine's power list
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Industry/Business
Results and Impact	Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan spoke on a panel discussing the work of the British Library's South Asia team and Two Centuries of Indian Print project at the launch of the India Gazette London magazine's power list of people in India-UK relations.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Panel participtation: European Conference on South Asian Studies, Paris
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu was on an expert panel on 'The Institutionalisation of Heritage in South Asia: the Possibilities of a Trans-Disciplinary Approach', at the European Conference on South Asian Studies, 24th-27th July, Paris.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018
URL	https://www.ecsas2018.org/

Description	Phase 1 Digital Skill Sharing Workshops
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	As part of our capacity building for the project we contributed to a series of digital workshops in India, with participants from several regions in South Asia as well as from the UK and abroad. To date we have delivered seven capacity building and skill sharing workshops. The workshops examine how to plan digitisation workflows, digital preservation and metadata standards, and digital humanities research methods with creative reuse of digitised collections, with practical sessions to encourage skills exchange and learning. Participants have included members of the general public and researchers, students of information technology, professionals in the technology industry, as well as professionals working in archives, museums, libraries and other public and third sector cultural heritage institutions. This has a great impact on our work, allowing us to promote and develop the sharing of skills in digital humanities research and to build capacity in the region. We regularly receive positive feedback from the participants and ideas on what to feature in the next seminars. Participant feedback is actively encouraged and gathered and attendees believe their knowledge of and comfort with digital scholarship concepts and methodologies have increased as a result of the workshop training. We also make the training materials, powerpoint presentations, and datasets available on our project web space, and ensure that the research methodologies taught in the courses are based on open-access software or publicly available online tools. Feedback gathered from the workshops has shown more than 85% of attendees felt their level of knowledge has improved through undertaking the training. The team has also received feedback about what participants enjoyed most about the workshops, with the opportunities to try out OCR tools in practice and the group task to apply Digital Humanities techniques cited as the most beneficial parts of the workshops. Finally, feedback from across the workshops has shown widespread interest in receiving further training from the library in related digital humanities areas such as text and data mining and handwritten text recognition training. In Phase 1 we committed to delivering 3 Digital Workshops, details of all the workshops we delivered follow: Digitisation all-day workshop at Jadavpur University (December, 2016). The first of our Digital Workshops for Phase 1 was held at Jadavpur University on Wednesday Dec 7 2016. It was well-attended by 27 librarians and information science professionals and students from Bengal. Institutions in attendance included the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, the State Central Library of West Bengal, Kolkata Metropolitan Library, National Mission on Libraries, Indian Museum Library, Bengal Library Association, Jadavpur University, and Kolkata Little Magazine. The workshop was delivered primarily by the project's Digital Curator on digital humanities and research methods, with contributions by the project's Principle Investigator and Project Curator about the content of the South Asian and Bengali collections and projects at the British Library. Professor Amlan Dasgupta, Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University presented on the Endangered Archives Projects that have taken place in Kolkata. During the practical exercise, attendees offered thoughtful examples of ways in which they could apply digital research concepts to their own collections. Participant feedback indicated this was the most popular part of the workshop and all attendees believed their knowledge of and comfort with digital scholarship concepts had increased as a result of the workshop training. Participants suggested that future workshops could cover one or more the following topics; digitisation standards, metadata standards, OCR for Indian scripts and rights management. During this trip the project's Digital Curator also delivered a presentation as part of the session 'Digital Curation & Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge' at the ICDL conference - Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi. He communicated the aims and achievements of the Two Centuries project, including the digitisation workflow, vision for an online exhibition and how we will enable digital research of the collection. After the session Tom was approached by several librarians from Indian institutions who are also looking for solutions in this area and would like to keep in touch to share any discoveries. Digital Workshop - Jadavpur University. The second Digital Workshop took place on Thursday 13th July 2017 and was a follow up of the first Digital Workshop held at Jadavpur University in Dec 2016. Attendees at that event expressed interest in receiving more technical training. Based on their feedback we decided to focus a half day workshop on optical character recognition for Bangla. We also ran a half day workshop for students of Jadavpur University introducing them to digital scholarship methods. 32 attended across the two sessions, 2 of whom attended both sessions. Workshop "Developments with Optical Character Recognition for Bangla" 19 professionals attended this workshop, from 10 different institutions. There was a mix of backgrounds, including librarians, faculty and those from computer science departments. The full list of attendees and their institutions is available on request. Dr. Naira Khan from the University of Dhaka's Computational Linguistics department introduced the key processes of how OCR works, from pre-processing through to segmentation and post-processing, highlighting the unique challenges for Bangla such as compound characters and ligatures. Tom then presented the practical applications of the OCR process within the context of a mass digitisation project of historical texts. The event concluded with a practical session where attendees used different OCR software on a sample of the BL's digitised Bengali books. They used Tesseract (using the command line), Transkribus, Google Drive, i2ocr and new OCR. Post-exercise feedback indicated Google Drive was the most accurate. Completed feedback forms indicate an improvement in the participant's knowledge of OCR after having attended the workshop. Only 6/17 attendees rated their knowledge in this area as 4 or 5/5 prior to the training, but 15/17 felt they had this level of knowledge after the training. When asked what they enjoyed most about the workshop, the opportunity to try out OCR tools during the practical session, especially Tesseract, was the reason mentioned most by most participants. Even for those who had some prior experience of OCR, usually only with Google, they all found the workshop acquainted them with new tools, some of whom were able to anticipate using for their own Bengali literature projects and databases and to save manual transcription. We also asked for opinions on what topics they would have liked covered in more depth and ideas for future workshops. The responses were wide ranging although there is a lot of interest in receiving expanded training around handwritten text recognition tools and initiatives, especially those for Indian languages. Being kept informed of the latest developments OCR for Indian language materials was also highlighted by a few participants as important to them. Other areas mentioned included more on OCR pre and post processing, programming skills if using command line, more time for a demo of the practical exercise. All feedback is available on request. Digital Workshop at the International Conference of Asian Libraries, New Delhi For the third Digital Workshop, the project's Digital Curator facilitated a workshop on Digitisation Standards and Workflows at the International Conference of Asian Libraries, held on 27th October at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. The workshop featured a panel of speakers from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences and the Indian International Centre. Tom presented on the British Library's digitisation workflow and creative reuse of digitised collections to the conference audience which numbered between 70 and 100 librarians from across India. During this trip to Delhi, Tom also participated in an international workshop on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library Design organised by the National Digital Library of India and UNESCO New Delhi. The project also held a fourth digital skills workshop at a conference entitled: 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn in India' held at Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in January 2018. The topic of the conference considered how digital technology might be effectively used to increase engagement, reach and access - focussing on community archiving, cultural heritage and memory institutions, exhibition design, and Indian cultural and linguistic content, encouraging open standards and interoperability. The second day was on use of videogames and new media in the cultural heritage space. It was attended by about 50-60 people, mostly Srishti students of mixed media, as well as a dozen or so speakers, many of whom were not academics, but rather technologists whose work intersects with cultural heritage: https://www.facebook.com/events/159005181394069/
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2017,2018
URL	https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/training-resources

Description	Phase 2 Digital Skill Sharing Workshops
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Study participants or study members
Results and Impact	As part of our capacity building for the project we contributed to a series of digital workshops in India, with participants from several regions in South Asia as well as from the UK and abroad. To date we have delivered eight capacity building and skill sharing workshops. The workshops examine how to plan digitisation workflows, digital preservation and metadata standards, and digital humanities research methods with creative reuse of digitised collections, with practical sessions to encourage skills exchange and learning. Participants have included members of the general public and researchers, students of information technology, professionals in the technology industry, as well as professionals working in archives, museums, libraries and other public and third sector cultural heritage institutions. This has a great impact on our work, allowing us to promote and develop the sharing of skills in digital humanities research and to build capacity in the region. We regularly receive positive feedback from the participants and ideas on what to feature in the next seminars. Participant feedback is actively encouraged and gathered and attendees believe their knowledge of and comfort with digital scholarship concepts and methodologies have increased as a result of the workshop training. We also make the training materials, powerpoint presentations, and datasets available on our project web space, and ensure that the research methodologies taught in the courses are based on open-access software or publicly available online tools. Feedback gathered from the workshops has shown more than 85% of attendees felt their level of knowledge has improved through undertaking the training. The team has also received feedback about what participants enjoyed most about the workshops, with the opportunities to try out OCR tools in practice and the group task to apply Digital Humanities techniques cited as the most beneficial parts of the workshops. Finally, feedback from across the workshops has shown widespread interest in receiving further training from the library in related digital humanities areas such as text and data mining and handwritten text recognition training. In Phase 2 we committed to delivering a further 3 Digital Workshops, details of all the workshops we delivered follow: The project held its fifth digital skills workshop (and first for Phase 2) at a conference entitled: Association for Asian Studies Conference, held at India International Centre, New Delhi in July 2018. The event took place at the India International Centre, New Delhi and was a collaboration between the British Library, Ashoka University and American Institute for Indian Studies. 16 archivists each from different heritage institutions around India and Cambodia attended. The workshop followed a previous 2 day main Archivists Workshop and there was a presented of the BL's digitisation standards followed by a talk on the IFLA guidelines for digitisation from Dr Suprabhat Majumdar, Chief Librarian at the India International Centre. Participants then got involved in a practical session which saw them break into 3 groups, each presented with a different case study of an archive and its holdings and asked to consider a digitisation strategy. The groups then presented back to the room. The workshop closed with a presentation from Tom on the lifespan of digital items after digitisation, namely how the BL has collaborated with researchers to encourage reuse of datasets. The workshop was part of the five day Association for Asian Studies conference, attended by two members of the team which also involved tours of various archives and libraries in Delhi, establishing links with cultural institutions based in India, attending talks and networking events. The sixth workshop was on Digitisation Standards & Workflows for Cultural Heritage; covering all aspects of the digitisation lifecycle, held at The Asiatic Society of Mumbai on 5th February 2019. This was for information professionals, librarians and archivists who wanted to learn about best practices for digitisation, and attendance was 35 people on the day. This workshop covered the practical aspects of undertaking digitisation. It focused on the digitisation of library and archival materials, though the principles are transferable to other formats. The training included guidance on lifecycle digitisation project planning, image specification and file formats, condition assessments, choosing equipment, and using optical character recognition to obtain machine readable texts that enable full text searching and big data analysis. The project as used as a case study to contextualise the various strands of digitisation and looked at how information technology is transforming research today, while also considering the creative ways that digital scholarship methodologies such as text mining, data visualisation and crowdsourcing could be applied to cultural heritage collections to enhance research potential. The seventh workshop was a two day workshop on Digitisation Workflows & Digital Research Studies Methodologies; held in IIT Indore on the11-12 February 2019. This was for information professionals, librarians and archivists who wanted to learn about best practices for digitisation, and attendance was 18 people on each day. Day 1 covered the practical aspects of undertaking digitisation, focusing on the digitisation of library and archival materials, though the principles are transferable to other formats. The training included guidance on lifecycle digitisation project planning, image specification and file formats, condition assessments, choosing equipment, and using optical character recognition to obtain machine readable texts that enable full text searching and big data analysis. The project as used as a case study to contextualise the various strands of digitisation. Day 2 focussed on how information technology is transforming research today and considered the creative ways that digital scholarship methodologies such as text mining, data visualisation and crowdsourcing could be applied to cultural heritage collections to enhance research potential. Presentations from researchers revealed how they have applied digital research techniques to enhance their own research. The eighth and latest Digital Workshop was held on the 20-21 August 2019 and was a digital workshop on archival standards for digitisation and digital research (with a colleague from British Library metadata services). The workshop took place at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and there were 41 attendees from 26 institutions, a mix of science archives, technology institutes and other cultural heritage institutions.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018,2019

Description	Possible Exhibition: Illustrated Lithographs from South Asia at the British Library
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr Priyanka Basu is doing preparation work for a possible exhibition on 'Illustrated Lithographs from South Asia' (with Dr Nur Sobers-Khan)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019

Description	Presentation and Show and Tell at '50 years of Bangladesh' event at the British Library
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	Local
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Olivia Majumdar presented a 'Show and Tell' at the '50 years of Bangladesh' event at the British Library alongside Arani Ilankuberan and Richard Morel.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Presentation and showcase of project to Asian Librarians and Advisers Group
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	The project team presented the project to the Asian Librarians and Advisers Group who visited the British Library to view some of the Bengali books dating back to the first printing press in India which are being digitised as part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project and meet the project team.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation as part of London Rare Book School (History of the Book in India), SOAS
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Dr Priyanka Basu presented on 'History of Book and Printing in Nineteenth Century Calcutta' as part of the London Rare Book School (History of the Book in India). She also took part in an showcase of unique items from the SOAS collaboration with "Two Centuries of Indian Print" on the June 29th, 2017.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation as part of the session 'Digital Curation and Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge' at the ICDL conference - Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	The project teams Digital Curator Tom Derrick delivered a presentation as part of the session 'Digital Curation & Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge' at the ICDL conference - Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi. He communicated the aims and achievements of the Two Centuries project, including the digitisation workflow, vision for an online exhibition and how we will enable digital research of the collection.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016
URL	http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/index.php

Description	Presentation at Exoticism in Contemporary Transnational Cinema: Music and Spectacle, Senate House London.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Project Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu presented on 'The Man or the Mandolin: Anthony Firingi, Cultural Memory and the Making of a Star', at Exoticism in Contemporary Transnational Cinema: Music and Spectacle, Senate House London, on 16th June.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation at South Asian Popular Culture Conference 2017: The Next Decade of South Asian Popular Culture: Established Patterns and Emerging Trends
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Dr Priyanka.Basu the project cataloguer presented on the topic of: "Prototyping the 'Folk': Film Sound, Pastoral and Hindi Cinema (1950-1970)" in the panel on 'Sonic Formations in South Asia: Technologies, Transmissions, Sites', at South Asian Popular Culture Conference 2017: The Next Decade of South Asian Popular Culture: Established Patterns and Emerging Trends, 27th-28th July, Birmingham City University, UK.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017
URL	http://www.bcu.ac.uk/news-events/news/south-asian-popular-culture-focus-of-international-conference

Description	Presentation at The Book Unbound: Academic Symposium Jadavpur University, Kolkata India
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	The Project Cataloguer, Dr Priyanka Basu presented a paper at The Book Unbound: Academic Symposium organised by the Two Centuries of Indian Print, project curator at Jadavpur University, Kolkata India between14th-15th July 2017. It was entitled 'The Many Lives of Raja Krishnachandra Ray: Koutuk-Bilas, Biography Writing and the Introduction of Gopal Bhand in Print in Nineteenth Century Calcutta'. The symposium attracted journalists from Indian national newspapers (one link is provided below).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017
URL	http://www.printweek.in/news/book-history-symposium-14-july-25344

Description	Presentation at a one-day Symposium on Indian Heroine in History, Art and Performance, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford UK
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Study participants or study members
Results and Impact	Our Project Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu presented on the topis of "The Making of an Actress and Her Autobiography: Nati Binodini and the 'Omissions' in the Colonial Theatre Archive", at a one-day Symposium on Indian Heroine in History, Art and Performance, on 23rd March 2017, Bodleian Library, Oxford UK.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation at the British Library Feed the Mind Series
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Dr Layli Uddin presented a paper on 'Migrant songs in South Asia' for the British Library Feed the Mind Series in Dec 2017.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation of project at the 'India beyond borders' onference organized jointly by NACIRA and The Nehru Centre
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	The Project Manager Alia Carter presented the Two Centuries of Indian Print, with the early planning, process and progress so far at the 'India beyond borders' Conference organized jointly by NACIRA (National Committee of Information Resource on Asia) and The Nehru Centre.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016

Description	Presentation of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project to the SOAS Library and academic staff
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	The SOAS Project Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu and South Asia Librarian Farzana Whitfield from the partner organisation SOAS presented the Two Centuries of Indian Print project to the SOAS Library and academic staff, with a showcase of items in the SOAS collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation on Dancing the Sculpture: Architecture and the Politics of Legacy in Odissi" at King's College London.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our Cataloguer: Dr Priyanka Basu presented on "Dancing the Sculpture: Architecture and the Politics of Legacy in Odissi" at the South Asian Seminar Series, on 6th February 2017, Department of English, King's College London.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Presentation: 5th International Congress of Bengal Studies, 25th-28th January, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka Bangladesh
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Cataloguer, Dr Priyanka Basu presented on 'Whose Music?: Ownership, Cross-Border Mobility, and the "Authenticity" of Kobigaan in West Bengal and Bangladesh', in the panel 'Oral Traditions, Invented Borders: A Performance-Based Journey Between Bengals', at the 5th International Congress of Bengal Studies, 25th-28th January, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka Bangladesh.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Presentations and panel particpation at the Jaipur Literature Festival at the British Library
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Key members of the project, Project curator Dr Layli Uddin and Principal Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan and Project curator Dr Priyanka Basu participated in a panel on knowledge production and circulation in the premodern world with a panel of researchers and academics, and presented the Two Centuries of Indian Print project together with other curators from across the library.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017,2018,2019
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/zee-jaipur-literature-festival

Description	Presentations at SOAS conference : The Past Before Us: History and Heritage in South Asia, SOAS, London
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Two key members of the project team presented at the conference: "The Past Before Us: History and Heritage in South Asia," at SOAS, London in Sept 2016. Project Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu presented a paper on 'Heritage, Performative Labour and Representation' and Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan delivered a paper "Textual Sources for the Study of Hir Ranjha in the British Library".
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016
URL	https://www.soas.ac.uk/south-asia-institute/events/heritage-and-history-in-south-asia/file113257.pdf

Description	Project Team Conference and Workshop participation and attendance 2019-2020 (26 events)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	The project participate and attended a number of conferences and workshops between March 2019-2020, these included: Dr Nur Sobers-Khan moderated a panel at the "Lahore Literary Festival", on the 22 Feb 2019 on Digitising Archives in Balochistan and Sindh; Dr Nur Sobers-Khan visit to the Lahore Fort restoration project under the Aga Khan Foundation, and meeting with the project leader, Mr. Wajahat Ali, and other team members, as well as meetings with the project team working on the restoration of the Lahore Museum (March, 2019); Dr Priyanka Basu introduced the screening of the film 'Pakeezah' (1972) at the UK Asian Film Festival 2019' Dr Nur Sobers-Khan: Visit to the Ameer Minai collection in Karachi (May, 2019). This is the collection of the Urdu poet, Ameer Minai, who was born in Lucknow in 1825, Tom Derrick presented a paper at the DATeCH2019 conference Brussels, 8-10th May 2019; Dr Priyanka Basu chaired a session at Senate House entitled 'India and partition: The Formative Phase (1947-60)' 21-22nd May 2019; Dr Priyanka Basu presented a paper at a workshop on 'Empire and the Senses' at the University of Kent - 10th - 12th June 2019, highlighting material from the project; Dr Nur Sobers-Khan: "Tilsim-i Aja'ib and Ta'bir al-Ruya: Visuality and Text: Bibliomantic Practices in Urdu Divination Manuscripts" at the annual ADES Symposium, (Asya Dilleri ve Edebiyatlari Uluslararasi Sempozyumu/International Asian Languages and Literatures Symposium) held at Nazabayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, in collaboration with Ahmet Yesevi University and Erciyes University (20-22 June, 2019); Olivia Majumdar Beyond the printing press: alternative means of production in the global history of print, Royal Asiatic Society; Majumdar, Olivia. 'The Home and the World: Representations of Women Leaving Purdah in early twentieth-century Indian Literature' at Modernism in the Home Conference, University of Birmingham; Basu, Dr Priyanka. 'Actors, Networks, Aggregates: Women and Contemporary Political Theatre Activism in Urban India', at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) 2019 conference, Shanghai Theatre Academy, China, 8-12 July 2019; Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, and Tom Derrick, Digital Curator for the project talked at the BL's AAS Seminar Series about their work encouraging OCR/HTR (Optical Character Recognition and Handwritten Text Recognition) for Arabic and Bengali scripts (12 Sept); Dr Nur Sobers-Khan: "Visuality and the Unseen in 19th-century Urdu-Language Lithographs: Talismans, Bodies and Divination" at the 'Sufism and the Body Conference' (12-13 September, 2019), part of the ERC-funded 'SENSIS: The Senses of Islam' project at the University of Utrecht; Dr Nur Sobers-Khan: Visit to the Mushfiq Khwaja Library to discuss the South Asia Collections at the British Library and current digisation projects; Basu, Dr Priyanka presented with Arani Ilankuberan, Curator of South Indian Collections, on Shakespeare in the collections at a conference entitled 'Women and Indian Shakepeare' at the University of Belfast, N.I 30th Oct-1st Nov 2019; Digital Curator Tom Derrick presented as part of a visit to the BL by James Lee and Wang Xuemao, from the University of Cincinnati; Basu, Dr Priyanka. 'Dance and the Promotion of Arts in Britain During the Second World War', at the Ocean Dance Festival, Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, 22-25 November 2019, Olivia Majumdar attended the following conference at the Royal Asiatic Society: Print unbound: the making/unmaking of newspapers and periodicals in Asia (9-10 January), Project Support Officer Paramdip Khera the Archives, Digitisation and Copyright KQ Breakfast event at the Society of Authors, Dr Nur Sobers-Khan presented a joint paper with Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert at a conference on Arabic-script OCR as part of the "Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project" at the University of Maryland on the 28-30 of January, Dr Priyanka Basu and Alia Carter presented to the SAALG meeting on the aims and progress of the project. The audience of between twenty and thirty will be from institutions such as SOAS, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, the Royal Asiatic Society, 31 January pm, Digital Curator Tom Derrick will be attending the Transkribus Conference in Austria with Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert on 6-7th Feb, Dr Nur Sobers-Khan attended a British Council Pakistan Event and met with Daniel Shah (British Council Director Research) and Basu, Dr Priyanka will be part of a panel speaking on - 'Nature, Place, Identity and Music in South Asia' at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology 2020, Bath Spa University, 16-19 April and is co-convening a panel speaking on -'Vernacular Audiovisual Productions of Religious Experience: New Media, Small Media and Religious Performance in South Asia', (and will be discussing material in the 2CIP collections ) at the ECSAS 2020, University of Vienna, 29th July-1st August.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019,2020

Description	Project Team Conference and Workshop participation and attendance 2020-2021 (22 events)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	The project team participated and attended a number of conferences and workshops between March 2019-2021, and are set to participate and attend more between March 2021-2022, these include: Basu, Dr Priyanka presented a paper, 'Digitisation workshop as the Curator of the British Library project ('Two Centuries of Indian Print') with Asiatic Society, Bombay and IIT Indore', India, February 2019; Basu, Dr Priyanka was invited to deliver a lecture, 'Street Theatre and Political Theatre in South Asia', at Loughborough University in the Media Cultures of South Asia course (convened by Dr. Rohit Dasgupta) in March 2019; Basu, Dr Priyanka presented a paper, 'The Observant Owl: The Many Ways of Seeing Colonial Calcutta in Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Hutom's Vignettes as the Night Owl)', at the Empire and the Senses Workshop, University of Kent, UK, June 2019; Basu, Dr Priyanka presented a paper, 'Women and Early Shakespeares in Bengali: Translation, Indigeneity, and Representation', at the Women and Indian Shakespeare Conference, University of Belfast, UK in October 2019; Basu, Dr Priyanka was invited to deliver a lecture, 'Researching the British Library Collections: Digitization, Accessibility and Writing', at Drexel University, Philadelphia in the course on Historical Methods (convened by Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya), in October 2020; Derrick, Tom attended a virtual roundtable on Arabic Script OCR/ HTR organised as part of the MELA conference on 1st October 2020; Derrick, Tom was a guest speaker at the meeting of the Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives and Museums group (AI4LAM), 17th November 2020; Basu, Dr Priyanka was invited to deliver a lecture, 'Theatre of the Oppressed: Reading Performance Cultures of South Asia', at King's College London in the course World Literature as Critical Pedagogy (convened by Dr. Sara Marzagora), in February 2021; Chag, Dr. Avni was invited to deliver a lecture, "Snippets of Modern Manuscript Culture in Western India", at the Roehamptom Study of Religions Seminary Series, February 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka was invited to deliver a lecture, 'The Postcolonial and the Decolonial: Scotland and the Empire' at the University of Glasgow in the course on Postcolonialism: Writing and Theory (convened by Dr. Sourit Bhattacharya), March 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will co-convene a panel on 'Nature, Place, Identity and Music in South Asia' at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology 2020, Bath Spa University, April 2021; Chag, Dr Avni will co-host the Annual Spalding Symposium on Indian Religion in April 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will present a paper on 'Nature in Song, Print, and the Visual Medium in Bengal: Looking into Archival Sources and Living Traditions' at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference 2020, Bath Spa University, UK, April 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will present a paper on '"The Nightingale is a Graceful Dancer": Bulbul Chowdhury, Dance Heritage and the New Nation-State of Pakistan', at the Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method Symposium, Centre for Cultural Research Development, Lingnan University, May 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will co-convene a panel 'Digitising Two Centuries of Indian Print: Implications for Decolonisation and Digital Research' (panel co-convened with Tom Derrick and Nicole Merkel-Hilf), at SHARP 2021: Moving Texts: From Discovery to Delivery Conference, University of Muenster, Germany, June 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will present a paper on 'Two Centuries of Indian Print: Digitizing Early Bengali Printed Texts' [as part of a panel on Perceptions, Politics and Preservation: The Printed Word in Nineteenth Century India], at SHARP 2021: Moving Texts: From Discovery to Delivery, University of Muenster, Germany, June 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will co-convene a panel 'Vernacular Audiovisual Productions of Religious Experience: New Media, Small Media and Religious Performance in South Asia', at the at the 26th European Conference for South Asian Studies (ECSAS), University of Vienna, Austria, July 2021; Basu, Dr Priyanka will present a paper on 'Kobigaan in New Packages: VCDs of the Matua Sarkars' at the 26th European Conference for South Asian Studies (ECSAS), University of Vienna, Austria, July 2021; Chag, Dr Avni will co-convene a panel '"Thus It is Said": The Role of Scripture in Legitimising South Asian Sectarian Communities', at the at the 26th European Conference for South Asian Studies (ECSAS), University of Vienna, Austria, July 2021; Chag, Dr Avni will present a paper on 'Temporally Responsive 'Sastra' in the Formation of a Modern Hindu Sampradaya', at the at the 26th European Conference for South Asian Studies (ECSAS), University of Vienna, Austria, July 2021; Chag, Dr Avni will co-host a conference 'Rethinking Hinduism in Modern India' with the OCHS in September 2021; Chag, Dr Avni will present a paper 'Regional Inflections in a Modern Sanskrit Dharmasastra', at the 18th World Sanskrit Conference, Canberra, Australia, January 2022.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019,2020,2021

Description	Research Seminar 'Unearthing the South Asian Collections' workshop 1: 'Regional Heritage' on 21 September 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	'Regional Heritage' was the theme of the first of two research seminars held at the British Library as part of the event programme's academic strand under the overarching title: 'Unearthing the South Asia Collections'. We held an open call for proposals for these seminars, inviting applications from independent and emerging scholars to present their research into the South Asia collections. From these applications, we selected ten speakers who presented their papers at the Library in the autumn. Speakers included independent scholars as well as scholars from institutions such as the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London. Doctoral students and early career researchers were encouraged to apply and we have now created a network of scholars actively engaging with the collections and providing new insights in the field of South Asian Studies.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/unearthing-the-south-asian-collections-2

Description	Research Seminar 'Unearthing the South Asian Collections' workshop 2: 'Central and South Asia's Colonial Pasts' on 5 October 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The 'Central and South Asia's Colonial Pasts' Research Seminar was the second seminar in the 'Unearthing the South Asian Collections' research seminar series. Papers were presented by emerging, independent and unaffiliated scholars on the British Library's South Asia collections. Both research seminars were free events open to the public and were well attended with 30-40 attendees at each event. We received positive feedback and calls to continue providing a platform for showcasing innovative research on the South Asia collections from emerging and early career scholars.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022
URL	https://www.bl.uk/events/unearthing-the-south-asian-collections-2

Description	Roundtable Discussion: Decolonising the Cultural Institution - Lived Realities and Reality Checks: Hopes and Fears in Decolonising the Cultural Sphere (SOAS, London)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Principal Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan participated in a discussion panel entitled: Decolonising the Cultural Institution - Roundtable Discussion: Lived Realities and Reality Checks: Hopes and Fears in Decolonising the Cultural Sphere (SOAS, London), 16 June
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Sharp Conference attendance and participation - decolonization and digital research
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Industry/Business
Results and Impact	A panel was presented on decolonization and digital research.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Show & Tell 2019-20
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact	The project held a number of VIp and Community Show & tells in 2019-20, including: an Introductory meeting with new Indian High Commissioner H.E. Mrs Ruchi Ghanashyam, a member of the Serampore College Archives, a UK study tour of members of the Bangladesh Ministry and the British Council (Bangladesh) with officials and librarians in the 'Libraries Unlimited' modernisation programme managed by the British Council for the Government of Bangladesh and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, led by John Dolan OBE and Ayub Khan MBE, and attendees of the 'International Library Leaders Programme' at the BL.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019,2020

Description	Show and Tell at British Library Boston Spa
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	Regional
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	Olivia Majumdar presented a Show and Tell on the Urdu collections at the British Library Boston Spa for the Leeds community group 'Hamara'.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Showcase of Project material to group of students from Cambridge Muslim College
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Undergraduate students
Results and Impact	The project team participated in a showcase of Urdu material to group of students from Cambridge Muslim College with information about the project, showcasing the 2CIP website, with promotional material.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Significant meetings with external partners in 2019-2020 (12)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	The project had a number of significant meeting during March 2019-20, these are listed below: Digital Curator Tom Derrick met with John Orazem, a software developer from University of Denver to offer advice in preparation of their application of handwritten text recognition (HTR) to their collection of 19th century sanatorium records of tuberculosis patients; The team met with staff from the Wellcome Collection Dr Angela McShane | Research Development Manager; Dr Alexandra Eveleigh, Collections Information Manager and Louise Grainger, Library Collections Analyst to talk about future partnerships for a possible Phase 3; Dr Vandana Sinha (Director, Center for Art & Archaeology, American Institute of Indian Studies, Delhi www.indiastudies.org) as part of a wider project/workshop on the Vijayanagara Research Project/Rutherford Fellowship; Tom Child the new Deputy Director - Global Science & Innovation Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy came to visit the library for an update on the project and next ambitions (with other BEIS similar funded projects in the Library); Digital Curator Tom Derrick met with digital media agency, Coggapp, who hosted a hack-day where they experimented with mining the datasets produced through the digitisation of 2CIP items; Digital Curator Tom Derrick and Dr Priyanka Basu had a meeting with Ankur Mittal Director D.K. AGENCIES (P) LTD, a major supplier of publications from India and other countries of South Asia; Digital Curator Tom Derrick attended a meeting which was held with the Alan Turing Institute. The meeting was part of a visit by Chris Skidmore, Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, introducing him to the Library's research purpose; Digital Curator Tom Derrick met with Andrew Harrison, a consultant involved with planning a new university space in Chennai, funded by Tata - who was planning a DH space and consulted us about our experience of DH in India, how it is delivered practically through teaching and physical space requirements; Dr Priyanka Basu and Digital Curator Tom Derrick attended the South Asia Archives meeting with Arcadia on 21st October on interventions by scholars and librarians about Arcadia supporting archival digitization in South Asia; Dr Priyanka Basu met with P.P Sneha from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on here points of interest re her project: Decolonising the Internet's Languages; Digital Curator Tom Derrick held a call with four members of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on the 16 Dec to learn about their efforts to incorporate metadata and images from Indian cultural heritage institutions into Wikidata and Wikimedia; Dr Nur Sobers-Khan attended a British Council Pakistan Event and met with Daniel Shah (British Council Director Research).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2019,2020

Description	Significant meetings with external partners in 2020-2021 (4)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	The project team had a number of significant meetings and talks during March 2020-21, these are listed below: Digital Curator Tom Derrick led the second meeting of the ABBYY Recognition Server group which is putting together guidelines for how to process different types of material within the British Library's collections on 7th April 2020; Derrick, Tom gave a talk to 73 librarians and PhD students from Indian institutions, arranged by the National Library of India. The talk, 'Developments with Optical Character Recognition for Printed Bangla at the British Library' was also streamed live on YouTube on 9th July 2020; Tom Derrick and Stella Wisdom from the Digital Research Team held a meeting with the National Library of Scotland and Wikimedia UK to plan a series of Wikimedia and Wikisource training for BL staff on 27th August 2020; Tom Derrick chaired the ABBYY User Group meeting on 7th September 2020.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2020,2021

Description	Skills Sharing programme with the National Library of India
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	The project team hosted a total of 10 mid-career librarians from The National Library of India for 2 x 1 week long skills exchange programmes. The attendees participated in a packed programme of talks from all areas of the Library and a day at the Boston Spa site.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	South Asia Seminars
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Since November 2016 the project team have been organising public seminars on subjects related the South Asia collections at the British Library, engaging scholars and researchers and members of the public working on South Asian material in the Library and beyond. The speakers in the series are drawn from an international community of researchers and writers on South Asia, and the audience includes members of the general and research publics from the UK, as well as international scholars visiting the library and visitors from abroad. This is a British Library 'What's On' public event; it is open to the public free of charge. The general public and local communities are encouraged to attend these seminars. The project team promote these seminars through Twitter, Facebook, the project webpage, the British Library's public event listing, and by the distribution of fortnightly seminar descriptions around BL reading rooms and public areas. We also promote these seminars through London University mailing lists, and Student mailing lists. Many of the seminars are sold out, meaning all 60 available spaces are booked out. For any seminars that are not sold out the general numbers we have come to expect are between 20-30 people in attendance. Ratings on our feedback forms are very good, with ratings for the seminar topic, detail, information presented and length usually rated at 8 and 9 out of 10. There are many favourable comments which include comments like:"The talk and discussion was v good" "I am new to subject area and it was a good introduction level" "A nice big audience! A sign that the talk was well publicised through efforts of curators" "Always a pleasure!" and "Very engaging and informative session", there is also praise for the slides and any multimedia used. Areas for improvement include some people having trouble hearing the lecture, finding the room, requesting to have handouts and to have more question time. In order to make improvements we have spoken to the events team, and to reception staff to make them aware of where these seminars are held, have lollipop stands in key areas of the BL to direct people. For audio issues we use the audio equipment in the room provided, but are making sure doors are closed, and the speaker know to speak clearly and loudly. The timings are set to start at 5.30 and end at 7pm, we are speaking to chairs to make sure there is 15 minutes of question time at the end. All of the seminars are recorded and are converted into podcasts by our Digital Curator and made available online on our project webspace. Many of the speakers who have presented in the South Asia Seminar Series have had their work featured on 'Scroll', an independent website covering news, politics, sports, culture and more relating to India and beyond. The South Asia Seminar Series began in November 2016 and have been scheduled till Nov 2020. Attendance numbers for South Asia Seminars: 30-60 people fortnightly. Number of seminars given to date: 62 seminars. A full list of the South Asia Seminar series is available on request.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2016,2017,2018,2019,2020
URL	http://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print

Description	Speaker : Bangladesh Studies Network meeting 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin was the discussant on panel on 'place, displacement, belonging' at the Bangladesh Studies Network meeting, at the University of Edinburgh in June 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker : DHAsia2018 conference (Stanford Humanities Center)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Our Digital Curator, Tom Derrick spoke at the DHAsia2018 conference (Stanford Humanities Center) on Saturday 28th April on 'Towards a digital awakening of Bangla: The challenges and opportunities for digitising early Indian print'
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018
URL	https://sgs.stanford.edu/events/digital-humanities-asia-dhasia-summit-meeting

Description	Speaker : Ireland India Institute, Dublin City University, Dublin 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Researcher/Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu spoke on 'Music, Mobilisation and Identity: Understanding the Cultural Politics of Matua Kobigaan in West Bengal and Bangladesh' at Ireland India Institute, Dublin City University, Dublin 2-4 Oct 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker : SOAS Literary & Arts Festival 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Cataloguer/Researcher, Dr Priyanka Basu spoke at the SOAS Literary & Arts Festival 2018 on Bollywood and its Impact on Global Culture, 27th May 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker at Conference: "Riot as a global political concept" -Univercidad Nacional De San Martin, Argentina
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin presented a paper at conference on "Riot as a global political concept" at the Univercidad Nacional De San Martin, Argentina, October 25-26th 2018. Her paper was on "A Microhistory of Violence: 1954 Adamjee and Karnaphuli Riots of East Pakistan.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker at Conference: Association for Asian Studies Conference / Archivist Workshop 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Our Project Manager Alia Carter presented the 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' digitization project as a case study at the Workshop for South Asian Librarians and Archivists on the 4th July 2018, explaining the project management side of the project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker: 'Dissecting South Asia: Development and Culture' at James Madison College, Michigan State University
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Project Researcher/Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu spoke on 'The Cultural Politics of Folk: Perspectives from India and Bangladesh' in 'Dissecting South Asia: Development and Culture' at James Madison College, Michigan State University, 16th Oct 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker: Brick Lane Circle's Annual History Week
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin presented her paper on "Maps of Muslim Invasions: Bhashani and the Char Muslims of Assam." at the Brick Lane Circle's Annual History Week, 20-28th October 2018 on the 20th October, highlighting the project and the Sylheti scanning to the audience.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker: British Library Labs Roadshows
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	National
Primary Audience	Undergraduate students
Results and Impact	Our Digital Curator, Tom Derrick spoke at the British Library Labs Roadshow, (UCL and University of Wolverhampton) on 'Digitising Early Indian Printed Books in 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017,2018,2019

Description	Speaker: InterAsian Connections VI: Hanoi" 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin presented at "InterAsian Connections VI: Hanoi", organised by Social Science Research Council, 4-7 December 2018, as part of a workshop on "Eurasia's Islamic Socialist Ecumene". Her paper was entitled "Mao-Lana Bhashani in Mao's China: Islamic Socialism and Subaltern Internationalism in Asia.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Speaker: South Asia Conference on the 11th Oct, Madison, 10-13 October.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our Project Researcher/Cataloguer Dr Priyanka Basu spoke on 'Vestigial Performances? Fairs & Festivals as Spaces of Redefining 'Folk' Practices' at South Asia Conference on the 11th Oct, Madison, 10-13 October 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Talk at Conference: 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn in India', Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Digital Curator Tom Derrick presented on the digital research achievements of the project at the conference entitled 'Updating Memory: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Turn in India', held at Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology; held in Jan 2018.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018
URL	https://www.facebook.com/events/159005181394069/

Description	Talk delivered at the Institute of Technology Jodhpur
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Tom Derrick and Adi Keinan- Schoonbaert delivered a talk to the International Institute of Technology Jodhpur, presenting on digital research initiatives of the project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Talk: "1969: Marxists, Murids and the Maulana in the unmaking of Pakistan," Workshop on the Centenary of Soviet Revolution, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Curator Dr layli Uddin delivered a talk at: "1969: Marxists, Murids and the Maulana in the unmaking of Pakistan," Workshop on the Centenary of Soviet Revolution, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Talk: "Bangladesh-Brick Lane-Harlem: art, activism, and scholarship", Harlem Adda, New York, USA
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin delivered a talk on: "Bangladesh-Brick Lane-Harlem: art, activism, and scholarship", at Harlem Adda, New York, USA
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Talk: "Bhashani and the char Muslims of Assam". Maulana Bhashani Foundation, New York
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Curator Dr layli Uddin delivered a talk on: "Bhashani and the char Muslims of Assam". Maulana Bhashani Foundation, New York
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Talk: "Maulana Bhashani and left politics in Bangladesh" Lahore Afkaar-e-Taza festival
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Project Curator Dr Layli Uddin delivered a talk on: "Maulana Bhashani and left politics in Bangladesh" at the Lahore Afkaar-e-Taza festival in Jan 2018
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Talk: 1957 Kagmari sammelon: festival of Muslim Communists, Freie Universität, Berlin
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Dr Layli Uddin delivered a talk: "1957 Kagmari sammelon: festival of Muslim Communists", Freie Universität, Berlin
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Transkribus Users conference
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Digital Curator Tom Derrick has attended the Transkribus Users conferences which was attended by over 100 librarians, archivists and technologists from European libraries and universities. The conference presented projects that had used Transkribus to automate transcription of manuscript and printed heritage collections.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018,2019,2020

Description	Two Centuries of Indian Print OCR competition 2017- International Conference of Document Analysis and Recognition, Kyoto, Japan
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Industry/Business
Results and Impact	Our project Digital Curator Tom Derrick organised the launch of the Two Centuries of Indian Print OCR competition - run in collaboration with the University of Salford's PRIMA Research Lab - as part of the International Conference of Document Analysis and Recognition, in Kyoto, Japan, November 2017.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017
URL	http://u-pat.org/ICDAR2017/CfP/cfp_v9_hq.pdf

Description	Two Centuries of Indian print workshop 'Islam and Print in South Asia: Part 2'
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan presented a paper on 'Illustrative Programmes and Bibliomantic practices in Urdu Tilsim-i Aja'ib texts: Visuality and Divination from Manuscript to Lithograph' at the 2CIP workshop 'Islam and Print in South Asia: Part 2' took place on the 26th of October, 2018, PB and NSK also chaired panels.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	VIP Visit: Acting High Commissioner of India Dr. Sujit Ghosh, 20 July 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The private viewing showcased the diversity and richness of the Library's holdings of South Asian collections related to the theme of Independence for the delegation from the Indian High Commission. We also promoted the launch of the India 75 Events Programme. It was well received and we had requests for similar activities and collaboration in the future.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	VIP Visit: Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan Dr. Faizel Aziz Ahmed, 28 July 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The private viewing showcased the diversity and richness of the Library's holdings of South Asian collections related to the theme of Independence for the delegation from the Pakistan High Commission. We also promoted the launch of the India 75 Events Programme. It was well received and we had requests for similar activities and collaboration in the future.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	VIP Visit: High Commissioner of India Shri Vikram K. Doraiswami, 12 December 2022.
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Other audiences
Results and Impact	The session showcasing the treasures of the South Asia collections was very well received with engagement of the collections and discussions of future collaboration. The event also marked the successful conclusion of the India 75 Events Programme in December 2022.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2022

Description	Wikimania Conference presentation
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Industry/Business
Results and Impact	Tom Derrick presented at the Wikimania Conference together with Lucy Hinnie (BL Wikimedian in residence) and Dominic Kane (UCL placement) about Wikisource initiative.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Wikisource 18th Birthday Celebration presentation
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Industry/Business
Results and Impact	Tom Derrick delivered a talk on the Wikisource Competitions held in 2021 for the Wikisource 18th birthday celebration.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2021

Description	Workshop for AHRC Newton grant holders, New Delhi, India
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Principal Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan participated in a workshop in New Delhi, India for AHRC Newton grant holders between 23-25 May, to shape the next call for proposals and met the new Head of Newton Fund in India. A further bid with the AHRC was submitted.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Workshop on Digitisation Standards at the International Conference of Asian Libraries, at Jamia Millia Islamia University, and National Digital Library of India and UNESCO New Delh
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Digital Curator Tom Derrick facilitated a workshop on Digitisation Standards at the International Conference of Asian Libraries, at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi on the 27 Oct 2017. Tom Derrick also participated in an international workshop on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library Design organised by the National Digital Library of India and UNESCO New Delhi during this time. He was joined by Abhijit Bhattacharya from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences who discussed the lifecycle of various digitisation projects undertaken by his institution, including some Endangered Archives projects. The other speaker at this session was Dr. S. Majumdar, Chief Librarian of the India International Centre, who presented the IFLA guidelines on digitisation workflows.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017
URL	http://www.iconf.ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/

Description	Workshop on Islam and Print in South Asia, British Library Sept and Oct 2018
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	In Phase 2 20 researchers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Europe and America gathered for a series of two workshops, that took place at the British Library on 28 September, 2018 and 26 October, 2018, to present their research stemming from their engagement with the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project and to create an international research network of contributors to the project's research outcomes. The emergence of print in South Asia has been understood as a transformative moment for Islam in the Subcontinent, heralding a period of revival and reform from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. According to historians such as Francis Robinson, Barbara Metcalfe, Brannon Ingram and others, the introduction of print in the early eighteenth century enlarged and popularised the discursive space of religious authority and encouraged a more local and spatial understanding of religious identity. However, the discussions on Islam and print in South Asia to date have focused predominantly on Urdu printed texts, on matters of Islamic jurisprudence, 'ulama or elite individuals and groups, and Islam's relationship to Hinduism, colonialism and nationalism. Both workshops helped to widen scope of earlier scholarship to focus on texts on a range of matters, in different vernaculars, not limited to, but including: Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Dobhashi (Bangla Musulmani), Muslim Mapilla, Sindhi and Pashto. The panels included: •Arabic printing in India, translation, and the transregional reach of print between the Middle East and South Asia; •Print and Multilingual religious expression in South Asian Islam; •Interactions between the Persianate and the vernacular in print; •Print and Performance: Theatre and Music in 19th century print culture. •The Social Spaces of the Vernacular •The Practicalities of Printing: A View from the Trade •The British Library Collections •The circulation of religious texts beyond the Subcontinent: from London to Mecca and Calcutta to Australia •Scandal, Gossip, and Songs
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018
URL	https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/indian-print/files/2018/09/Islam-and-Print-Programme-28-September-corrected...

Description	Workshop participation at the Equip Showcase Event; Research With Impact (Brussels)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Project Manager Alia Carter participated in a workshop session at the Equip Showcase Event; Research With Impact (Brussels)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017
URL	http://ec.europa.eu/research/index.cfm?pg=events&eventcode=247DE06A-95AB-61E0-6E1E44F43FA54F49

Description	Workshop session at the AHRC International Development Summit (UK)
Form Of Engagement Activity	A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact	Project Manager Alia Carter participated in workshop session at the AHRC International Development Summit, explaining the project and the progress so far. (UK, ne 2017)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2017

Description	Workshop: India Office Medical Archives
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Public/other audiences
Results and Impact	Our project Digital Curator Tom Derrick took part in an India Office Medical Archives workshop organised by IOR and Digital Scholarship which brought together academics and digital humanities professionals to consider the digital research possibilities of the newly digitised collection based around health and disease in British India (1780-1910)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018

Description	Workshop: Unversity of Exeter
Form Of Engagement Activity	Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme?	No
Geographic Reach	International
Primary Audience	Postgraduate students
Results and Impact	Principle Investigator Dr Nur Sobers-Khan was invited to the Unversity of Exeter as a respondent for a workshop held on the 10th of November, 2018 for the forthcoming publication on Bedil, the 17th/18th century Persian poet, entitled "Framing Bedil: Arguing the Indo-Persian Self" as a special edition of the journal South Asian Intellectual History. The organiser was Dr Sajjad Rizvi, and participants came from the North America and the UK.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity	2018