About the Archives
The Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) is a space for institutional records and a collecting public centre for the contemporary history of biology in India. The Archives is free and open to the public. It is located in a 1500 square feet space in the Eastern Lab Complex (ELC) basement in NCBS, a space that was formerly occupied by Obaid Siddiqi, the co-founder of NCBS, and his laboratory. The Archives include two reading rooms, one processing office, an indoor and outdoor exhibition area and a storage space for documents and artefacts. The reading rooms are open to the public and researchers without prior appointment. However, you may need an appointment to review the archival holdings. For queries, please send an email to archives@ncbs.res.in.
Team
Various technical teams from across NCBS – civil, architecture, electrical, IT, instrumentation, hospitality – helped conceptualize and build the physical structure of the Archives at NCBS. The archiving team (see list below) has been a crew of over 40 students and professionals working in short stints between 2016 and 2018: archivists and historians, journalists and writers, scientists and administrators and librarians, students of sociology, engineering, history, photography, the sciences, marketing, education, and architecture and design. The Archives is governed by a guiding Archives Policy, and an internal Archives Review Committee and Steering Committee. Starting mid-2019, an external advisory board will assess the work of the Archives every year. The Archives has had generous assistance from the archivists and conservators at various centres in Bangalore, across India and around the world.
Abhishek Banerjee
Ananya
Ananya Shukla
Anupama Nayak
Aparna U.
Apoorvaa Krishnamurthy
Archit Guha
Archita Raghu
Ayush Jain
B.R. Ravika Singh
Bhargav B.S.
C.S. Bala Soundarya
Chythrika Duggu
Devina Kuttappa
Diba Siddiqi
Indira Chowdhury
Ipsa Jain
Ishita Shah
Kailas Honasoge
Kushal Choudhary
Mamatha Jaigopal
Marisha Thakur
Minnu Mathew
Nikhataaliya M. Mhaishale
Nithila M.K.
Pragadheesh V.S.
Ravi Kumar Boyapati
Renuka Kulkarni
Sachin H.B.
Sammitha Sreevathsa
Shalom Gauri
Sham Bharadwaj
Shankar Sunil Nair
Sharath Ahuja
Shourjo Chatterjee
Simran Sangal
Sowmithri Ranganathan
Srivalli Kiran
Sushmita Krishnan
Vaishnavi Giridharan
Vedika Sasalatti
Venkat Srinivasan
Vishal Deep Sharma
Vrushal Pendharkar
Jayashree Ratnam
Ranjith P.P.
Satyajit Mayor
Sowdhamini R.
Uma Ramakrishnan
Upinder S. Bhalla
Venkat Srinivasan
The Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) is dedicated to holding institutional records and is also a collecting Archive for the history of biology in India over the past 150 years. In addition to the setting up of a repository, the Archives is also undertaking four other collaborative projects over the coming three years.
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Archives enable diverse stories. This statement serves as a guiding principle for us through the workflow of historical records – sourcing for material, archival judgment and accessioning policies, understanding context and arrangement, preservation/conservation, and physical and digital access. In late 2016, when we started the endeavour to build a new archive, we wanted to deliberate on the purpose of an archive and what environments it could nourish in the future.
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Collaborations
The Archives at NCBS is working in partnership with a variety of organizations across India and the world. These collaborations include efforts to standardize archival description, build shared digital catalogues, and develop narratives from archival material.
Archives Image Gallery
Picture credit: Ravi Kumar Boyapati
Resources
Resource forms and access policies in the Archives
Funding
The Archives is based at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. NCBS is a centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, autonomous under the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India. The Archives has been made possible from a mix of government funding and external grants.