Developing a strategic program for safeguarding palm-leaf manuscripts in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Historical evidence proved that countries like Sri Lanka had their own heritage and indigenous knowledge in local life aspects for centuries. For thousands of years those indigenous treasures were transferred through generations by means of word-of-mouth and ancient documentation methods. With the advent of technology those methods had been evading in time, however, monasteries, museums and few individuals have preserved valuable vessels of indigenous knowledge in their custody. In this regard, palm-leaf manuscripts present to be stable carriers of traditional information, which are still preserved by using ancient techniques. National Library of Sri Lanka invests in research to improve these local techniques. At present, with the help of digitization, these resources are being copied to electronic form on digital repositories. However, simple digitization will not serve the purpose of these resources, thus they need appropriate metadata format to enable the exploitation and sharing across other databases. This article elaborates on the application of strategies that deal with both improved ancient methods and using suitable metadata schema in preserving palm-leaf manuscripts in Sri Lanka.