The Volunteer Archivists

Two hundred years of printed publications in India's Odia language are dying of collective negligence. A handful of volunteer science enthusiasts must fight against all odds, including legal battles, to digitally-archive crumbling books.

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2022

35m

Documentary

Overview

The Volunteer Archivists tells the story of Srujanika, a volunteer-led collective in the Indian state of Odisha that archived some of the rarest printer publications published in the last 200 years. The archive — Odia Bibhaba — now houses over 10,000 books and hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and dictionaries that otherwise would have been lost forever due to collective negligence and the poor state of digitization by the state archives.

Directed by Subhashish Panigrahi