“e-Archives - Online Cataloguing System of Odisha State Archives, Bhubaneswar (www.odishaarchives.nic.in), was launched by Hon'ble Minister of Tourism and Culture, Odisha Sri Ashok Chandra Panda on 09.08.2015 at 11 AM on the occasion of August Kranti Divas.
Inaugurating the portal, Hon'ble Minister expressed his happiness over easy accessibility of the archival records to the entire world. He is hopeful that Odisha will establish a special identity of its own through this programme. This On-line Cataloguing System of the archival records would be of immense help to the researchers of the world over and in process would bring laurels to the State, the Minister emphasized.
NIC Odisha State centre has taken a laudable step in the development of e-Cataloguing of the archival records to make it accessible to all the stakeholders throughout the world. The digitized archival records are available in the portal for general public, students, and researchers. The portal contains who is who, publications, popular records, journals, document heritage and e-Cataloguing. e-Exhibition of August Kranti Divas in collaboration with Victoria Memorial Museum, Kolkata is available in the portal. The cataloguing includes – Books, records, newspaper, pvt. Collection, Gazette of India, journals of periodicals, publications, oral achieves (voice recordings of freedom fighters), maps, microfilms etc. The indexing of digitised archival records are available in the portal. There is a dedicated server in State Archives with LAN connectivity to around 30 computers. Facility is provided to research scholars to register online their names for study facility inside State Archives. Communication with them is made through SMS. They can get more archival records in the computerised study centre of the State Archives. Some of the rare archival records available in the digitised records are : 1) Will of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of Sikh Empire based on Punjab regarding donation of the gem " Koh-i-Noor" to Lord Jagannath Temple, Puri. But it could not be materialised as he died and the Kohi-i-Noor was handed over to Queen of England.
2) "Vande Mataram" the National song written by Shri Bankim Chandra Chatterjee when he was Dy. Magistrate(ICS Officer) of Jajpur Subdivision of Odisha( 1882-1884).
e-Archives is developed using open source technologies PHP, PgSql and Drupal as CMS by Dr R N Behera, STD as Team Leader, Sri Ajit Kr. Pattanayak, PSA, Ms Namita Senapati, PSA as team members under the guidance of Sri S.K.Panda, DDG & SIO, NIC, Odisha.
