MYSORE: “Information sites such as Wikipedia have a strong western bias. A majority of our languages are oral with no script and no written literature and are fast vanishing,” said University of Hyderabad Vice-Chancellor Prof Ramakrishna Ramaswamy.
He was speaking at the Graduation Day of International School of Information Management (ISIM) at University of Mysore on Sunday. He said, “In addition to being information management professionals, you will have to be creators of manageable information. As a nation, we are poor archivists. This is one reason why we have such a poor sense of history. You have no records to remind of what was done and why, particularly since human memory is so short.”
Stating that a copy of ‘Young India’, a journal started by Mahatma Gandhi, was available only in Gujarati and bibliography of Indian mathematician available only in University of Tokyo, he said unlike nations that keep careful records of their important documents, we do not seem to care.
“Digitalised archiving is far less expensive than it ever was. If you feel everything is already online in a multicultural country like ours, we have not even begun to scratch the surface. The majority of our languages are oral with no script or written literature,” he said.