Schools all set to digitise academic records

Schools all set to digitise academic records

Would you like to find out how your grandparents fared in school? Or get in touch with your old batchmates? Now, you can get all the academic records of your ancestors at the click of a button. After city libraries started digitising rare books, now even schools have begun digitising their academic records. Recently, one of the oldest schools in the city, Shardashram High School, in Dadar, has digitised its records dating to as far back as 1945. It’s one of the first schools to have taken up this exercise. These documents include students’ leaving certificates as well as board exam mark sheets. Hoping to preserve important documents for posterity and also solve the problem of lack of storage space, schools have started to scan copies of important documents such as school leaving certificates, mark sheets, and other documents. All such information, is now available in a matter of minutes. Makarand Ranadive, managing director of Ved Information Pvt Ltd, the company that has previously digitised rare books for the Anjuman Islam Group of Institutions for their antique library. “Students generally approach schools for duplicate school leaving certificates, or sometimes to find out details about their old batchmates. With digitisation, everything is available in seconds,” he said. These documents can also be emailed or viewed at a time by multiple users. “Documents are protected against decay due to fungus or white ants that generally plague records over time. It is safe even in case of a fire or floods. One just has to log in and take a print out of the document and it is as good as the original,” he said. Ranadive’s company, besides the Anjuman Islam project has also helped digitise hand-written manuscripts of poems written by saints for the Samartha Ved Devta Mandir.