Creating a Catalogue of Printed Heritage in Faizabad Public Library

The archive located in Faizabad’s Public Library in Badakhshan, Afghanistan houses a limited and unique collection of printed periodicals in Dari-Farsi, Pashto, and Turki languages from all over Afghanistan, dating from 1946 to present. This Planning Grant project, led by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) in partnership with the local archives surveyed this archive, preparing it for preservation and digitisation and resulting in a detailed inventory of the first 10 years of the Badakhshan Newspaper (1325/1946 - 1334/1955).

The project team relied on the Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften’s (IAAW) open-access manual for sustainable archiving, and gaining closer insight into the political, socio-cultural and environmental situation of Badakhshan in the 20th Century, a time defined by conflict and internal shifting powers, growing border militarization and the subsequent severed connections of countless cross-border communities.