Cultural and community knowledge
#Living culture can disappear quickly when it is held only in memory, a private collection, a temporary story, or an unmaintained website. We prioritize material connected to Assam while leaving room for other community knowledge that is at risk or hard to access.
Living practices and digital folklore
#Contemporary culture includes the things people teach in person and the things they make online. Both need context, consent, and community control if an archive is going to remain useful.
Living practices
Crafts, techniques, recipes, games, oral histories, and place-based knowledge recorded through audio, video, photographs, and transcripts.
Digital folklore
Local and regional memes, viral material, and other online expressions with cultural significance.
Language change
Assamese-English code-switching, local slang, and expressions that emerge within particular generations or neighborhoods.
Platform-specific storytelling
Instagram Stories, Facebook posts, and other community narratives can disappear when a post or account is removed. Local examples include:
- Events announced only through temporary social media posts.
- Artists and practitioners sharing techniques only through platform accounts.
- Government announcements published on social media but omitted from official websites.
Whole-platform archives
Some digital cultures only make sense when the links between profiles, posts, tags, comments, and dates survive. Where access, consent, law, and storage allow, we want to preserve public parts of whole platforms or bounded local collections instead of keeping isolated screenshots.
Documents and personal collections
#Printed and private records often remain difficult to search or vulnerable to physical loss. Digitization should preserve provenance and respect the conditions set by the people who contribute material.
- Newspapers and publications: Assamese newspapers and historical publications digitized with OCR and searchable text. See Digitizingঅসম.
- Personal collections: Letters, diaries, photographs, and recordings contributed by families or communities through clear consent protocols.
- Research: Papers about Assamese culture, language, ecology, and history made easier for local researchers and students to find.
Government accountability and transparency
#Public information should remain available long enough for people to compare what changed, what was promised, and how decisions affect local life.
Policy and website records
#- Government website changes, removed pages, and policy updates.
- Policy documents preserved with before-and-after comparisons.
- Election manifestos and records of campaign commitments.
- Local government decisions that affect community resources.
Civic participation and RTI
#- RTI requests, responses, timelines, and recurring gaps in public information.
- Public meeting records and community organizing documents.
- Citizen feedback and patterns in government responses.
- Public consultations and other records of community participation.
Public communications and media
#- Official social media accounts and public announcements.
- Searchable broadcast transcripts and fact-checking records.
- Media coverage patterns, advertising time, and documented misinformation.
- Changes in public narratives around policies, places, and community issues.
Infrastructure and public spending
#- Development projects and their effects on nearby communities.
- Changes to roads, public spaces, water systems, and other local infrastructure.
- Budgets, tenders, resource allocation, and project delivery records.
- Photographs, maps, and observations that show change over time.
Access, alerts, and reuse
#- Community-controlled databases with public, restricted, or member-only access where appropriate.
- Alerts for policy and website changes that affect local communities.
- Public interfaces that support community research and education.
- Links to existing transparency networks, advocacy groups, and compatible archives.