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Hitesranjana Sanyal Memorial Archive,
the Urban History Documentation Archive at the
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

In the year 1993 the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta undertook a programme of preserving textual and visual documents from public institution libraries and archives as well as from private collections and bring them together in a single and unique archive of a combined pool of textual and visual documents for researching on colonial Eastern India, mainly on history of society and culture of the region. The archive of the CSSSC is often recognised as a trend setter of modern alternative archives within an institutional framework, and is closely associated with most of the major institutional archive initiatives in South Asia.

The archive of the CSSSC mainly comprises three types of documents,

• a) printed literature in the vernaculars relating to social and cultural history, mostly periodicals from Eastern India printed from the inception of printing until the 1950s and in Bengali and Assamese languages,
• b) visual documents, mainly early popular visual forms of productions in Bengal, modern academic art forms and photographs and
• c) advertisement and commercial arts in Bengali from 1800–1950.

The present strength of the collection is about 2,000,000 pages of printed material rescued in microform and further digitised from microfilms, about 30,000 images and 15,000 documents relating to advertisement and commercial arts. Apart from the broad categories, the archive has a good collection of cartographic materials and a separate section of books mainly in the vernaculars as part of the library's special collection.

Over a span of fifteen years the archives of the CSSSC became a vibrant hub of scholarly activities in Eastern India and got engaged in several link programmes with institutions around the world.

From the beginning the documentation programme of the CSSSC started as part of a collaborative project with Enhanced Research Capacity (ENRECA) of DANIDA as part of a major research project on Urbanism and Democracy, subsequently the archive received funds for documentation from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore, SEPHIS, Amsterdam, Japan Foundation - Asia Centre and the Ford Foundation.

Since 2004, the archive, alongside documentation programmes started working on several bibliographic and bibliometric surveys, a few projects are on historical bibliography of South Asia in collaboration with the University of Chicago, digitisation of documents partly funded by the SAMP (South Asia Microfilm Programme) of the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago and Endangered Archive Programme for a pilot on tracing endangered documents in public institutions of West Bengal and Assam

For detail listing of projects please see: http://www.cssscal.org/projects.html

As a major breakthrough for digital dissemination of entire archive, the CSSSC recently collaborated with the SAVIFA project of the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University and the University Library of Heidelberg.