DIGITISING A NATIONAL HERITAGE |
Digitising a museum collection is often framed as a technical challenge. Procure high-resolution cameras and scanners, hire trained photographers and scanning technicians, build databases and upload images to the cloud.
In Pakistan, however, museum, archive and heritage digitisation is as much about navigating governance structures, institutional histories and professional anxieties as it is about the technology being used.
For more than two decades, the Lahore Museum has not been led by a museum professional. For the past 16 years, the Taxila Museum has lacked authority over the majority of its reserve collection. During those same periods, specialised expertise in collections management, conservation and museum documentation have steadily eroded across much of the country’s cultural sector.
The result is that projects that should primarily be about technology have become exercises in navigating institutional uncertainty. The recent digitisation of the Lahore and Taxila Museums demonstrates how the success of a digital archive depends not only on cameras and computers but on the people and institutions responsible for the collections themselves.
While the digitisation process of the Lahore and Taxila museums is helping preserve thousands of priceless artefacts, it has also revealed the bureaucratic failures, institutional neglect and governance challenges that have long threatened the nation's cultural heritage
While the digitisation process of the Lahore and Taxila museums is helping preserve thousands of priceless artefacts, it has also revealed the bureaucratic failures, institutional neglect and governance challenges that have long threatened the nation's cultural heritage
In early 2024, major work began to digitise the Lahore and Taxila museums, its scope of work becoming Pakistan’s largest museum digitisation project. The ambition was straightforward — create a comprehensive digital record of collections that span millennia of South Asian history.
Combined, these two museums hold a collection that ranges from Gandharan sculptures and Paharri miniatures to colonial-era artefacts and modern art, representing one of the richest cultural and historical archives in the region. Yet, much of this heritage has remained inaccessible, poorly documented and vulnerable to deterioration.
In 2017, the Government of Punjab took a loan from the World Bank to develop its tourism infrastructure, which led to the establishment of the Punjab Tourism for Economic Growth Project (PTEGP). PTEGP’s main task was to develop tourist sites across the province and distribute funding for desperately needed conservation and maintenance work. Digitising the Lahore and Taxila museums became one of its core projects, for which the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) was hired.
Digitisation of the collection, particularly in the case of the Lahore Museum, also meant that it could then go on to its next step: a whole revamp of the museum’s physical infrastructure itself. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) had been in consultation with the museum regarding upgrading efforts, yet a project at such a large scale could not happen until a full inventory of the museum was made.
Time was ticking. Yet, early on, the limitations were not technical but rather political.
WHO OWNS THE COLLECTION?
One would assume that a museum holds complete and unrestricted access to the collection under its roof. But in Pakistan this is not the case.
When digitisation work began at the Taxila Museum, it came to light that, while the collection on display belonged to the provincial Punjab government, the artefacts in the reserve collection — hidden away from the public — were under the domain of the federal government and their Department of Archaeology and Museums (DOAM).
Why this split? In 2010, with the passing of the 18th Amendment and subsequent devolution of ministries to the provinces, several museums that had been established by the federal government or already existed at the time of independence were brought under provincial control.
DOAM and the Punjab Directorate General of Archaeology had simply not yet worked out how the objects in Taxila would be transferred, and personnel of the Taxila Museum employed by the Punjab government were not even allowed access to the reserve collection, unless in the presence of a representative from DOAM.
With this development, it was decided that Taxila’s reserve collection could not be digitised during the project timeline of 11 months.
The Lahore Museum also sits in an unusual administrative arrangement that complicates decision-making. The museum is managed by a board of governors and does not come under either the federal government or Punjab’s Directorate General of Archaeology.
Instead, it is an “allied department” of the much broader Tourism, Archaeology and Museums (TAM) department of the Government of Punjab, which also manages the Tourism Development Corporation of Punjab (TDCP), the Directorate General of Archaeology Punjab and Punjab’s Department of Tourist Services (DTS Punjab), which are all separate departments. For final administrative matters pertaining to the Lahore Museum then, the highest authority becomes the secretary of TAM.
Therefore, a matter of who to contact and speak with for improvements in either museum is not a very clear process.
This is true for other provinces as well, where the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi is one such case. While the museum first went to the provincial government after the 18th Amendment, it........