To pre­serve Sikh her­itage, the Pan­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary is do­ing what Sikhs have not done in their 552-year-old Sikh his­tory. On a mis­sion of dig­i­ti­za­tion of rare so­cial, cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal re­sources of Pun­jab, es­pe­cially in Pan­jab and also at var­i­ous other cen­tres across the world, the Pan­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary, which started its jour­ney in 2003, with a team ded­i­cated to its mis­sion and with mea­gre re­sources has achieved the tar­get of digi­tis­ing 1.15 mil­lion pages by De­cem­ber 2021, with nearly three-fourths of which were rare sin­gle-copy records.  It may come as a sur­prise that since its in­cep­tion in 2003, the PDL has digi­tised 38 mil­lion pages.

The Pan­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary, the first of its kind cen­tre in the Pan­jab, which started with digi­tis­ing 60,000 pages in the first year of its op­er­a­tion, reached new heights in 2021 and the ded­i­cated team un­der the able lead­er­ship of Davin­der Pal Singh is mo­ti­vated to achieve its zenith by digi­tis­ing 10 mil­lion pages in 2022.

In the last two years, even the Covid19 pan­demic could not dampen the spirit of the PDL team, which, ex­cept for the pe­riod of com­plete lock­down in the early months of 2020, was ac­tive to re­lent­lessly carry on their work, man­aged to over­run their tar­gets dur­ing the pe­riod. 

PDL is ded­i­cated to:

• Ad­dress­ing her­itage loss due to en­vi­ron­ment, ig­no­rance and de­struc­tion
• Sav­ing in­valu­able trea­sures to en­rich the pre­sent and en­lighten the fu­ture
• Con­nect­ing peo­ple glob­ally by pro­vid­ing con­tin­ued free on­line ac­cess
  

Avowedly, as stated in its mis­sion state­ment, the Pan­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary (PDL) is fo­cused on lo­cat­ing, digi­tis­ing, pre­serv­ing, col­lect and mak­ing ac­ces­si­ble the ac­cu­mu­lated wis­dom of the Pan­jab re­gion, with­out dis­tinc­tion as to script, lan­guage, re­li­gion, na­tion­al­ity, or other phys­i­cal con­di­tion.

When asked about the unique and painstak­ing work of the Pun­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary, the hum­ble ar­chi­tect of the ef­fort Davin­der Pal Singh said, “I think Sikhs have done it many times, me­dia was dif­fer­ent. Guru Nanak Sahib taught us to read and pre­serve the writ­ings of el­ders. We are just con­tin­u­ing that tra­di­tion.”

In 2022, the Pan­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary will em­bark on the pro­ject to digi­tise nearly 10,000 coins, mostly those minted in the Pan­jab. 

Sketch of The Sikhs -A Sin­gu­lar Na­tion who in­habit the Provinces of the Pen­jab sit­u­ated be­tween The Rivers of Ja­muna and In­dus by Lieu­tenant Colonel Mal­colm -a very book, with a rare spelling of “Pen­jab” and de­scrib­ing the so­cial and po­lit­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment of the Pun­jab is part of the PDL records.

The Sketch of the Sikhs; a sin­gu­lar na­tion, who in­habit the provinces of the Pen­jab, sit­u­ated be­tween the rivers Jumna and In­dus, clas­si­fied as ex­tremely rare, was writ­ten by John Mal­colm, a British Army of­fi­cer, pub­lished in 1812, who served the British Army in In­dia dur­ing the early years of 19th cen­tury de­scribes the his­tory, man­ners and re­li­gion of the Sikhs whom he terms as an “ex­tra­or­di­nary race” in­hab­it­ing the provinces of Pan­jab stretched, be­tween the rivers Ya­muna and In­dus. This nar­ra­tion is based on his ob­ser­va­tion and in­ter­ac­tion with the Sikh sol­diers and peo­ple of Pun­jab and Sikh Nir­mala saints.

Pun­jab  Dig­i­tal Li­brary of­fers rare his­toric books and pub­li­ca­tions through so­cial me­dia at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals.  These books gen­er­ally are in PDF for­mat and part of the cy­ber records of PDL. WSN shares one such book from the PDL cy­ber­space.

The mil­lions of pages pre­served by PDL are not just archived in the four walls of the Pan­jab Dig­i­tal Li­brary at its base in Chandi­garh but are in cy­ber­space as a vast re­source for schol­ars, ac­tivists and her­itage ex­perts.