The historical features that belong to the culture of popular society, such as traditions, languages or buildings or documents/ knowledge resources, that were created in the past and still have the historical importance are known as Heritage.
- Tangible:- our historical sites, buildings, monuments, objects in museum artifacts and archives.
- Natural:- our waterways, landscapes, woodlands, bogs, uplands, native wildlife, insects, plants, trees, birds and animals.
- Intangible:- our customs, sports, music, dance, folklore, crafts, skills, and knowledge.
All 3 comprises and provides us with a common language and enables to dig deeper into to find and explore our identities in detail.
Why Heritage is important?
- it portrays and helps to shape our identity
- highlights our priorities and values
- provides clues to our past and shows how our society has evolved
- examines our customs and traditions
In that way, Noolaham Foundation in Jaffna involves in preserving the heritage of Sri Lankan Tamil Speaking Community. Noolaham Foundation has involved in this process since 2005.
Anyone around the world can have free access to Noolaham resources via
http://noolaham.org/ - For books, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers
http://aavanaham.org/ - Multi-media resources such as Oral-Histories, Images, Videos, Hand-written documents.
To read more about Noolaham works; check out this article.
On 22nd and 23rd of February 2020, Heritage Exhibition was conducted by Noolaham Foundation at Jaffna Hindu College's prayer hall.
They exhibited the book/magazines/newspapers/palmyra or ola leaves collections which are about 200 years of age, oral history procedures along with demonstrating how to access noolaham.org and aavanaham.org web-pages.
On 22nd the Exhibition was started by appreciating and honoring the person who donated and helped in giving the documents for Noolaham to digitize. Following that, both 2 days from 1.30 to 3.30 discussions on preserving our heritage were held. We could able to witness lots of both younger generation people engaged in checking out the exhibition.
On 22nd the Exhibition was started by appreciating and honoring the person who donated and helped in giving the documents for Noolaham to digitize. Following that, both 2 days from 1.30 to 3.30 discussions on preserving our heritage were held. We could able to witness lots of both younger generation people engaged in checking out the exhibition.
Most people were so excited to see how palmyra leaves/ola leaves are been digitized in Noolaham. Dr.Green's (from the United States) book collections were able to be found at the exhibition. Dr.Green who learned Tamil Language and translated lots of medicine and chemistry-related notes from English to Tamil. Similarly, Magazines and newspapers of long time published materials were exhibited with descriptions for the easiness of the audience.
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| Explaining how they digitize palm leaves |
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| Crafts related archives done by Noolaham Foundation |
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| Noolaham's yearly achievements from its origin year 2005 to till now |
A book published by Hindu priest from the digitized palm leaves by Noolaham
The Morning Star and other rare important documents
Followings are Dr.Green's Collection
The quote is really interesting.
It tells that "Whom we printed writings on the stone then wrote on aedugal (Palmyra/ola leaves) from ola leaves took up to printing press and from printing press, we now moved to the Internet"
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| Ezhuththaani is the tool used to write on ola leaves |
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| Old age pots parts which have Tamil Brahmi writing and Tamili signs |
Check out this interview given by Mr.Gopinath & Mr.Mayooranathan of Noolaham Foundation Regulatory Board members interview to IBC Tamil on the exhibition. They discuss what challenges they are facing and other things related to digitization.
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