Collections Development

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Noolaham Foundation’s Collections Development aims to build useful collections to serve the knowledge needs of the diverse Sri Lankan Tamil speaking communities. It balances the need to preserve the diverse historic and cultural materials with the need to provide more current educational, health, legal and vocational information. It also includes the creation of collection development policy, and collection assessment.

Collections Development Sub-Committee

The Collections Development Sub-Committee focuses on building collections to represent and serve the needs of diverse Sri Lankan Tamil Speaking communities via an open, participatory and inclusive process. The role of the Collections Committee is to provide support and expertise to the Program Manager and to each other regarding the mission. `

Membership The Collections Committee shall in minimum consist of the following five members:

  • Collections Development process mentor from Governance Board
  • Program Manager (Secretary)
  • Upcountry Archive Representative
  • Women Archive Representative
  • Muslim Archive Representative

In addition, the committee is open to members representing the following special collections:

  • Anti-Caste Struggle Archive/Dalit Archive
  • Vedar Archive
  • LGBTQ+ Archive
  • Minorities of North East Archive

Members are appointed for 2 years renewable terms. The committee must be approved by the Governance Board. Goals

  • Provide feedback and help develop/evolve the Collections Development Policy
  • Be advocate for the Special Collections, be the communities’ voices
  • Identify, link, network potential works, content sources, content contributors, collaborators and partners, volunteers
  • Provide feedback as requested for projects.

Meetings and Reporting The Collections Committee shall meet quarterly. It reports to the Governance Board.

Communication NF : Process 23 : Collections Development email thread and slack channel

Collections Development Policy

The goal of the Noolaham Foundation’s Collection development policy is to give clear directions for developing and creating collections via its Program and Projects. Collecting, preserving and providing access to materials is a resource constrained activity, thus prioritizing materials based on objective criteria becomes necessary.

Noolaham Foundation collects and develops materials created by, about and related to Sri Lankan Tamil speaking communities. This is a basic policy principle that applies to all our collections with the exception of Tamil reference resources. All public domain or permissions obtained Tamil reference resources, specifically encyclopedias, dictionaries and bibliographies are preserved and made accessible. Noolaham Foundation recognizes the gaps and silences in its own and mainstream archives and libraries of many marganizlied communities’ resources, including those of Women, Upcountry Tamils, Muslim, LGBTQ, Vedar, Minotiries of North East and oppressed caste communities. Collections via Program and Projects is one of the main avenues within the organization to repair those gaps and give voice to the marginalized. Thus, developing a diverse collection representing the diverse communities Noolaham Foundation represents and serves is at the core of Collections Development Policy. Balancing the need for educational, economical, and development focused resources with historical and cultural resources is also a major consideration. Noolaham Foundation recognizes that those with funding resources, influence/power and organizational capacity are better represented via published resources and have the capacity to support documentation projects. Thus, an intentional and institutional framework is needed to allocate attention and resources towards the marginalized voices.

Examples of allocating attention and resources towards the marginalized voices:

  • Prioritize processing and access of marginalized communities’ resources.
  • Dedicated Staff Person - If resources about/by a particular community or archive is under represented, then having a dedicated staff person for that archive will help.
  • Developing Archival/Oral/Visual/Artifact Resources - If there is a lack of published resources by/about a particular community, then focusing on oral, visual, archival and artifact documentation can help.
  • Equitable Collection Development Resource Allocation - If the main office is located in one place, then there is a likelihood that resources from that region would receive the most attention and resources. Having more equitable collection development staff and volunteer resources to represent diverse communities can help balance that.
  • Representation - Collection Development Committee needs to have diverse voices represented and actively providing input.
  • Develop accessible formats such as audio books for print books and transcripts for audio/video resources.

The following criteria is used as a general guideline to evaluate a material at the item level.

  • Is a Special Collection item - 20
  • Information Value
    • Rare Resource (ola manuscript, inscription, unique folklore, rare artifact) - 25
    • Educational & Scientific - 15
    • Public Health, Public Policy, Human Rights - 15
    • Historic and Cultural Value - 15
    • Artistic and Aesthetic Value - 10
    • Social or Spiritual Value - 10
  • Use Value
    • Has use value to a wider audience (i.e text books, public health info) - 15
    • Has use value to specific or limited audience (i.e memoirs, anniversary publications) - 10
  • At-Risk item
    • High Risk (only one copy of the work exists, endangered due to external factors) - 25
    • Low Risk (i.e published work with known holdings) - 5
  • Permission Obtained - 5


Collections Specialists Network

Collections development work is undertaken by a network of collections specialists spread across Sri Lanka, including Upcountry, East, Mannar and Jaffna. These specialists undertake the work according to the collection development policy, with focus on special collections. Their work is compensated based on work completed and transferred. The work undertaken by Collections Specialists can include:


  • Writing biography based on original research
  • Writing biography based on secondary reference
  • Writing an organizational profile based on original research
  • Writing an organizational profile based on secondary reference
  • Writing a magazine/newspaper article
  • Writing a research article
  • Creating research guides
  • Oral history recording (personal histories)
  • Oral history recordings (research topics)
  • Own photography - 100 selected photographs
  • Own videography - 1 hr selected recording
  • Graphic work
  • Event recording - per event
  • Field research essay
  • Source collection - 25 published works
  • Source collection - 100 archival records
  • Metadata creation (for archival records)
  • Audio and video collections from online sources (with permission)
  • Dataset development - 100 records per dataset
  • Completed Short Documentary (20 - 40 mins)
  • Completed In-Depth Documentary (1 - 2 hrs)
  • Develop, organize and execute community event

Note that all original works created for Noolaham Foundation will be released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. The creator/author will be fully credited as per the license.

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