Africa-Press – Mauritius. The National Library has made acquisition of an A0 Scanner and has developed a Document Management System (DMS), both initiatives costing around Rs 5 million each.
In that context, the Minister of Arts and Cultural Heritage, Mr Avinash Teeluck, effected a site visit, this afternoon, at the National Library in Port Louis to take stock of the processes of the A0 Scanner.
This endeavor forms part of the project aimed at digitising documents. The other phases of the project which consist in the scanning of 1.6 million documents, uploading the DMS, indexing, tagging, classification and web portal projection, will start in October 2021.
In a statement, Minister Teeluck underlined that the acquisition of the A0 Scanner and the implementation of the DMS will both contribute to the revamping of the way archives are being preserved.
He emphasised that the National Library has been able to kickstart its digitisation process of documents with the acquisition of the Scanner. The overall objective of the project, he said, is to better preserve our archives and provide easy online access to the public.
As regards the DMS, he indicated that it provides the facility to store, manage, and maintain the digitised documents. Furthermore, the Minister pointed out that the digitisation exercise had already started with existing resources and added that to date some 60,000 pages of newspapers in A4 format have been scanned.
Mr Avinash Teeluck recalled that some 1.6 million documents dating back to 1835 will be scanned and the Optical Character Recognition system being used will enable readers to carry out research in the archives through keywords.
