Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Better days ahead for researchers

nodal agency: The Kerala Council for Historical Research building in Thiruvananthapuram.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Aspiring researchers who had to make do with the sparse resource base in the State for their academic pursuits can take heart.

In its first effort at reaching out to researchers in the far-flung parts of the nation, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) is joining hands with the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) to make accessible to researchers its precious resource base.

Awaiting researchers is a goldmine of primary and secondary material including 2,50,000 books, a larger number of journals, the largest collection of non-official private papers of prominent national leaders, political parties, business leaders, litterateurs, social activists and administrators in the country and a larger collection of newspapers and journals in different Indian languages.

“We do not have the necessary outreach now. Researchers must now come to Delhi spending huge sums of money if they wish to access out resource base and many are forced to spend very little time and be satisfied with a cursory look at the documents and volumes. We are entering into an academic partnership with the KCHR to provide a point of access to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Kerala,” Mridula Mukherjee, director, NMML, said here on Sunday.

Dr. Mukherjee, KCHR chairman K.N. Panikkar and director P.J. Cherian told a news conference that the partnership between the NMML and the KCHR would not be limited to merely providing access to the NMML resources to researchers.

It is envisaged as an academic partnership that would see the KCHR function as the nodal agency of the NMML for Kerala and adjoining regions and sharing of resources between the two organisations to promote serious historical and interdisciplinary research.

The two organisations would also have joint projects in areas of common interest, oral history, collection of private archives and publication of translations, research work, source materials and monographs.

The NMML would extend to the national level the local history project ‘History Walk’ initiated by the KCHR two years ago. The two would also jointly organise seminars, lectures and short-term courses aimed at enriching historical consciousness among university, college, school students and the general public.

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