Dear all,

I am extremely delighted to announce India's first (?) GLAM collaboration with a State institution in New Delhi, the capital of India. The National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum (NHHM), New Delhi has approved our draft and we will soon begin a 6 month pilot project with them.
I have been corresponding with their director for over 2 months now, since the GLAMcamp in Amsterdam. After a series of conversations with the Director, Dr Ruchira Ghose, I sent in an approval and after two meetings, she sent in a revised proposal to the Ministry of Culture in India. Just two days ago, the Ministry approved this project and has also provided her a small grant to support our incidental expenses. NHHM has over 30,000 objects including pottery, textiles, metal work, paintings and more.

Goals:

6 month pilot project to churn out 25 'Good Articles'.
Training staff and capacity building
Recruiting 10 new editors from art colleges to work on site for digitization/documentation
Make the museum a regular avenue for GLAM meets

Note: Good Articles here doesn't mean GA by en-WP standards. We intend to create at least 25 articles with substantial information. Would like your inputs on this.

Challenges:

Delhi has a small community, so we really need help from EVERYONE possible, local and global
The staff members are only comfortable with Hindi, so we'd appreciate ALL help possible from hi-WP editors
Biggest challenge: India is a vast country with craft traditions in millions of villages. So, at the time of acquiring, many art objects do not come with published information, documentation and references. Much of this stuff is 'word of mouth', oral traditions and stories of artisans etc. We have asked the Museum to start documenting and publishing these stories under their Publication cell BUT that will take time. Do you think using oral citations in this case would be helpful?
Since this is my/our first time, we will appreciate guidance on scanning, making an MoU and help creating/maintaining the project page. Can someone please help? *makes puppy face*

I apologize for this really long mail but, my next meeting with the Director is on the 14th of February when we will start our 'lead-up' program to the project.

To all the WiRs: Did you make some sort of a program schedule or a timeline that I could use?

I would love all your suggestions on this project and am *very* excited to make my own share of GLAM contributions and mistakes :) Of course, now we will also start contributing to TGIM.

Cheers,

Noopur

--
Noopur Raval
Student
Arts and Aesthetics
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Ph: 9650567690