About APDP’s Digital Archive

Since its establishment, APDP has been the subject of a considerable amount of media, press, scholarship, writing, creative projects, and other such content about the organization, its founder, its members, and the people it supports and represents in the cause for justice against enforced disappearances in Kashmir. However, much of the content found in the public domain has remained unindexed and has not been compiled as should have been done incrementally throughout the years for record-keeping purposes (particularly because such content is scattered online in the public domain). APDP has limited staff and their operations are invested in making real-world changes and providing relief so much so that it would not have been possible earlier to think that the organization should and must take control of all the content that references it, its purpose and its work, to then exhibit an index of such readily available online information to the general public and interested parties.

As such, a need for a massive data gathering operation has emerged to create a Digital Archive of all of the media, scholarship, press and other such items (in publication) that refer to APDP or any of its activities or make APDP and its members the subject of such work. At the present, an unusual disparity exists in APDP’s public presence. Within the Kashmiri and international community, the organization is highly respected and well-known. However, beneath the surface, the organization has been increasingly busy with its internal operations and day-to-day tasks. This has led to a situation where third parties, from scholars, journalists, researchers, artists, filmmakers to students and activists who are not internal to the organization, have taken on the role of bringing awareness about APDP to the greater world. The problem with such a situation resides in the fact that all such efforts are dispersed in an unorganized, isolated and chaotic manner if one were to try and engage with all that vast amount of content available on the internet (from a myriad of sources). There are no bibliographies, no indexes, no lists and there is absolutely no database that checks, evaluates, curates and then gathers such information. The primary benefit of our Digital Archive is to memorialize and highlight the work that APDP has been doing over the years in connection with a large community of respected professionals from diverse fields of knowledge and culture.

APDP’s Digital Archive Project hopes to transform APDP’s website into an online museum and also a site of commemoration and remembrance. The greater advantage is that it will become so simply by proper organization and citation of the content that third parties (academics, researchers, activists, journalists, etc.) have already produced. At all times, APDP staff will be in charge of the process of selecting and approving which content is appropriate for the purposes set herein. It is primarily for this reason that the Digital Archive Project must elaborate a workflow based on collaborative teamwork. Needless to say, the outcome of the project is to develop the Digital Archive and along with it the APDP website so they can become encyclopedic resources for all those interested in enforced disappearances and APDP’s work throughout the years. The project is ongoing and will be incrementally expanded upon as more content is generated and as more participation from a wide variety of individuals working with APDP is established. Our date of official launch of this project is August 18th, 2019.