Speaker: Venkat Srinivasan, Head, Archives at NCBS and founding member and co-director, the Milli Archives Foundation

Chair: Prof. Aparna Vaidik, Prof. of History, Ashoka University

The Milli Archives Foundation (https://milli.link/about/) is a non-profit body dedicated to the nurturing of archives in South Asia. It facilitates discussions among the community around issues of diversity, archival standards, conservation, physical and digital access, pedagogy, privacy and the development of inclusive description standards. The talk will present an overview of four current projects run by the Milli Archives: a guidebook to look at the intersection of ethics, law and archives; a software annotation tool to allow additional user-driven description of archival objects; a benchmarking approach to assessing the quality of an archive in South Asia; and a two-day teaching module that covers ten steps for small organisations to set up their own archive, from sourcing to archival use.