Room 201, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
The Milli Archives Foundation is a non-profit body dedicated to the nurturing of archives in South Asia. It facilitates discussions among the community around issues of diversity, archival standards, conservation, physical and digital access, pedagogy, privacy and the development of inclusive description standards. And the open access digital platform that Milli intends to build will allow the public to find, connect, describe and share archival material and stories. Over the last four years, these ideas have gathered steam through collaborations and the free-to-public Milli Sessions, with over 1500 registrants, over 400 active participants from across India and other countries, and 40+ partnering institutions.
In this talk, we would like to offer an overview of four current projects we run: a guidebook to look at the intersection of ethics, law and archives; a software annotation tool to allow additional user-driven description of archival objects; a benchmarking approach to assessing the quality of an archive in South Asia; and a two-day teaching module that covers ten steps for small organizations to set up their own archive, from sourcing to archival use.
Venkat Srinivasan heads the Archives at NCBS, a public collecting centre for the history of science in contemporary India. He is also a founding member and co-director of the Milli Archives Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the nurturing of archives. He currently serves on the institutional review boards for the archives at IIT Madras and ISI Kolkata, and on the board of the Commission on Bibliography and Documentation of the IUHPST (International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology). He is a member of the Encoded Archival Descriptions – Technical Sub-committee (Society of American Archivists), and Committee on the Archives of Science and Technology (CAST) of the ICA Section on Research Institutions (International Council on Archives). He is a life member of the Oral History Association of India (OHAI), and served in an executive role in OHAI between 2020 and 2022. Prior to this, he was a research engineer at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University. In addition, he is an independent science writer, with work in The Atlantic and Scientific American online, Nautilus, Aeon, Wired, and the Caravan. He graduated with a Masters in Materials Science from Stanford University, a Masters in Journalism (science) from Columbia University, and a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Delhi.
