Discover stories from the Archives at NCBS
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Finding rabbit holes in spreadsheets
I joined the archives as a subject-matter expert in physics, to help create metadata – essentially information about the existing digitized archival materials that makes it easier to be discovered, managed, and preserved. My role was to look at physics-related material at the archives through the lens of someone trained in the field. During my…
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The Almirah – In Search of Jamal Ara’s Papers
“”Birds of Bihar… Birds of Bihar…” she would keep mumbling this over and over again in her last days. I am not sure why she kept repeating the phrase. Perhaps it was a draft of a book that she was writing, or a project she wanted to undertake. I do not really know. But as…
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Out of focus
As a biology major interested in the history of science and medicine, the P K Sukumaran collection piqued my interest. For one, he hailed from Thalassery in Kerala, north of my hometown, and his research on understanding sickle cell anemia was something that we often came across in newspaper reports and biology textbooks. But my…
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Cranes, Ladakh, and Sálim Ali
At first glance, doesn’t it seem like a typical field image from the 1970s? Men with binoculars and cameras, an all-male group of researchers in the foreground of a barren landscape. Let’s zoom in now: there are soldiers in uniform, military jeeps, and also what appear to be barracks in the background. Now, for me,…
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Reflections on OH Workflows – With special focus on Sensitivity Reviews
My first introduction to Oral Histories was in 2022, when I began summarising interviews with conservationists at the Archives at NCBS. The summary would consist of a document with archival identifiers, a biography, and an abstract featuring indexed headings with details under each. Bound by deadlines, however, we had to streamline this time-consuming process. The…
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Archiving a cytogeneticist’s material
I immensely enjoyed archiving A P Krishnaja’s material, primarily because as a Biology graduate with molecular biology research experience, sifting through her laboratory data felt like looking through a window to the past. Various laboratory methods have evolved over time to accommodate the growing needs of the researcher, but certain routines have been preserved from…
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M S Swaminathan’s papers
The archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, is among the few repositories featuring a collection of papers from notable Indian scientists. In 2023, my research on radioisotopes and their research applications led me to the Archives at NCBS to consult the papers of Dr M.S. Swaminathan, who is widely hailed as…
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Why we changed the way we collect material in 2024
In 2023, we went on a rather energetic, and (for us) unprecedented drive to bring in exciting new material into the archives. Rather quickly into the year, we realised that the standard methods of acquisition just didn’t bring in archival material from female scientists, the way they did from male scientists. We had less of…
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A Wayanad Interlude
“Bahugana said – ‘Don’t eat the salt of anyone, you will be beholden for life.’” “Nature is diverse, of course we need to be too.” “They call us the B-team of the Forest Department.” With humour and passion, the members of the Wayanad Prakrithi Samrakshana Samithi (WPSS) shared the history of their decades-old participation in…
