By Kedar Timalsina
Banepa, Mar. 17: Discussions have started on digitally archiving the editions of the 121-year-old Gorkhapatra and the 57-year-old The Rising Nepal.
At the digital archive workshop organised by the Gorkhapatra Corporation in Dhulikhel, experts from various fields stressed the need for archiving and preserving the copies of the two national dailies digitally.

At the workshop, Harsha Man Maharjan, researcher at the Martin Chautari, presented a paper on the state of digitisation of newspapers and the path forward for Gorkhapatra.
Kumar Shrestha, information officer at the National Archives, talked about the collection, management and digitisation of Gorkhapatra at the Archives. He informed that all the copies of Gorkhapatra and The Rising Nepal collected by the Archives since the two papers’ inception had been kept safely.

Purna Lal Shrestha, head of the Tribhuvan University Central Library, shared his knowledge on ways to make the digital archives reader-friendly.
Talking about the structure media organisations needed to develop to maintain a digital archive, Dr. Baburam Dawadi, assistant professor at the Institute of Engineering Pulchowk Campus, called on the Gorkhapatra Corporation to establish its own data centre through research.

Speaking at the programme, Dr. Bal Krishna Bal, head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Kathmandu University, highlighted the need to develop a corpus to preserve the published materials of Gorkhapatra and The Rising Nepal. Dr. Sudhamshu Dahal, head of the Department of Languages and Mass Communication at the same university, called efforts to digitise the two publications “positive.”

Bishnu Prasad Subedi, executive chairman of the Gorkhapatra Corporation, shared that the Corporation had begun digitising its publications by making them technology friendly. He said this while concluding the workshop which was inaugurated a day earlier on Tuesday by Minister for Communication and Information Technology Gyanendra Bahadur Karki.