Tracking Goa, through the online world

Frederick Noronha

Imagine a treasure house of books, which exists, which anyone can dip into, and is simply free for the asking. Imagine? That option already exists, in the shape and form of archive.org. This is an online site that stores an amazing amount of shareable (digital) books.

Brewster Kahle started the Internet Archive, way back in 1996. It now runs a digital library website (called archive.org) and also give free access to collections of digitised media (websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print material). The goal of the Archive is laudable: to keep the internet free and open. It wants to provide “universal access to all knowledge”.

This is where Goa comes in. The archive.org has a surprisingly large number of books, audio and other content relating to tiny Goa. Let’s take a look at some of these.

To get a idea of what’s available go to archive.org and simply search for Goa. Alternatively, visit archive.org/search?query=Goa

There’s an overwhelming amount of Goa-related content there, so much so that you could get lost in the ‘content jungle’. For instance, there’s the book most of us would have never seen. It’s called ‘Goa Di Jeri e Goa Di Oggi’. In case you’re wondering, it translates to ‘Goa Of Yesterday And Goa Of Today’. It was published in 1958, and was scanned at the Goa University, from the rich collection that archivist Dr. Pissurlenkar, donated there.

That’s the beauty of the internet. If any one takes the trouble of scanning and digitising a book, it instantly becomes available to everyone, all across the globe.

Not just that. Anyone can contribute to this project. If you have copyright-expired (or unencumbered) work on hand, scan and upload.

There are many official gazettes from Goa on this site. That perhaps clutters the space somewhat, and the gazettes should have been kept somewhere else, in another subdirectory. But if you search for ‘Goa NOT Gazette’, you can get a more interesting collection.

There’s other content online. Magazine issues of Casa de Goa in Lisbon, or old agriculture related plant books from Goa. Some copyright expired books are there, together with audio talks and recordings of programmes too.

In case the copyright of a book is not yet expired, then the Internet Archive acts like a normal, lending library. It allows you to read a book for a few minutes. After that, your access can get continually renewed.

The point is that one book which is owned and retained at the library, is not given to more than one buyer at the same time. This way, it ducks the piracy charge. (But this has been tough, with the IA having to face cases and legal pressures all the time.)

Tourism books on Goa, audio copies of some interviews, and a lot more is available. Since diverse sources are adding to this pool, you can come across material which you had never known existed. For instance, there’s a copy of the 62-page ‘A Escol Medico Cirurgica De Goa’, dating back to 1959.

This is a mix of audio, video and text. You can also find ‘Goa Gill Live in Goa; in 2000.’ There are old texts, for instance one by Mariano Saldanha, on the first printing press in Goa.

There’s a strange mix of past and present, English and Portuguese (not to forget Konkani and Marathi), and also work from diverse sources. Rare books like one on Gawadi (the Konkani dialect) of Goa can be found here.

Some of the books by professor Prakash Parienkar, of Goa University’s Konkani Department, are available here. These include his creative writing, and also ‘Mhadei-Kallzantlyan Kagdar’ (an eco-anthropological study of Mhadei river basin). It has been described as: “This is first book in any language in the world on the interstate river of western India.”

As the reader would know, creating books with a lot of colour photographs and images can be a rather costly affair. So this work, uploaded by kumargoa, sidesteps that issue well. By sharing a digital copy, the 412-page book costs nothing for the reader to download and peruse, while the writer can also share his work, published by the Directorate of Arts and Culture. See http://alturl.com/bb3rz

There are other rare, hard-to-find books available here too. For instance, one came across Sr Emma Maria AC’s ‘Women in Portuguese Goa’ (1510-1835)’, a 2002-published book. It is based on her PhD thesis. Since this is an under-copyright book, one has to log-in and borrow it. Only one reader can do so at any given time.

It is published by IRISH, the Institute for Research in Social Studies and Humanities. In the book she looks at institutions like the Recolhimento of Nossa Senhora de Serra, Recolhimento of Maria Magdalena, and the Royal Convent of Santa Monica.

There are a whole lot of Konkani books available on archive.org. For some — understandable — reason, works in the Kannada script Konkani are more ubiquitous than others. It’s probably just that this segment knows the power of sharing and has access to enough technology to make it happen.

Many copyright-expired books in Portuguese are also available here. When the author has passed away a long time back, sharing their work is not blocked by legal restrictions. In India, copyright expires some 60 years after the death of an author.

Portuguese (and Portuguese-era) books available here include Cottineau de Kloguen’s ‘A Historical Sketch of Goa…’ , ‘La Ville de Goa’ by Linschoten together with many of his other works, Whiteway on ‘The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, 1497-1550’.

There is also ‘Noção de alguns filhos distinctos da India Portugueza ‘Que se illustraram fora da patria.’ The machine translation of the lengthy title of this book translates (perhaps ineptly) to: ‘Notion of some distinguished sons of Portuguese India, ‘Who became famous outside the homeland.’

This initiative has not been without its problems. As noted, it ran into legal issues too, with some publishers and others dragging it to court. The latter have different ideas on how libraries should be run, and knowledge shared, in times when technology changes the rules of the game drastically.

Unfortunately, while a whole lot of digitisation projects have been announced in Goa itself, not much sharing (of content online) seems to be happening from here. Books related to Goa have more chances to show up from some other part of India or the globe. Projects like the ‘Million Books Project’ have also done a lot to enhance access to writing and knowledge.

Some insight into the organisation, and the vision that went into founding it might be apt here.

Brewster Kahle — a digital librarian, computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge — also co-founded Alexa Internet some 30 years back. Alexa Internet, Inc, the company he co-founded, was a web traffic analysis company. Later, it was acquired by Amazon in 1999, and Amazon shut down its Alexa Internet services in May 2022. Not surprisingly, the company was named as a homage to the Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt.

This is really impressive…