Curating History
The General Amar Singh Kanota Library and Museum has been conceptualized by Eka Archiving. “Getting a sense of the collection, its size and range, is the first challenge,” says Pramod Kumar KG of Eka Archiving, “and working out how to catalogue and classify it is the next. It’s important to keep storage concerns in mind. A collection spends most of its time that way, so it makes sense to document it in groups that will be viable to store. Size forms the basis of the groups or lots we make, but we allow for cross-referencing and thematic documentation. We use a simple but effective system of keywords for this. With a period library like this one, the books are treated as objects in a museum would be—since they won’t be circulated, as in a lending library—so we don’t use the Dewey decimal system, but accession numbers.”
