Like many countries around the world, Pakistan was forced to go into a COVID-19 national lockdown in March 2020. While this confined most people to their homes, it also had the unintended consequence of catapulting many institutions into embracing going digital. At the National College of Arts (NCA), Pakistan’s oldest art school, this meant embracing online tools and digital resources that had previously been resisted or under utilized in the teaching of art, design, and architecture. The experiences of lockdown have highlighted inadequacies and inequities within our systems, and as Pakistan returns to normal there is a renewed will to maintain the momentum gained during the pandemic, and an increased realization of the need for developing and sustaining digital infrastructures. The National College of Arts Archives collect and preserve the records, manuscripts, and other artefacts of historical and archaeological significance at the National College of Arts. From March 2021, the NCA Archives are initiating a project to collect, preserve, and digitize historic building documentation created at the NCA over the past 145 years. This paper will follow this process and document the NCA Archive’s attempt at creating a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) database of historic building documentation in Pakistan. It will summarize the experiences of the six-month pilot project, including opportunities that have arisen in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in light of the Government of Pakistan’s ongoing Digital Pakistan initiative. The paper will also document and analyze the difficulties and hurdles that might emerge during the course of the project as the NCA Archive’s digital infrastructure is built from the ground up in a post-colonial setting and a post-COVID world.

2. Mayo School of Arts/National College of Arts
• Established in 1875 by British Crown,
restructured and modernized in
1958
• Oldest formal art school in Pakistan;
pioneered art, design, architecture
education and practice.
• Legacy of creating and collecting
historic building documentation
(commissions + Dept. of Architecture
student work)

3. • Redevelopment of infrastructure and policy framework of NCA
Archives to encourage knowledge discovery and better integration of
archival material and research into teaching and coursework/research
at the NCA.
• Development of a repository of historic building documentation that
is publicly accessible and reusable:
₋ to promote local research on the cultural heritage of Pakistan and South Asia
₋ inform building conservation decisions at the local and national levels

4. Why FAIR?
• No standardization and collections not being used
• Historic building documentation also not being used (missed opportunity to
inform conservation decisions)
• Full compliance to the FAIR principles can only be understood as a
long-term goal but necessary to explore the feasibility of
implementing the FAIR principles in the postcolonial Pakistani, and in
the local historic building documentation contexts.
• To develop conditions necessary for future FAIR compliance.

5. Prerequisites and Capacity Deficits
• Need to identify and rectify capacity and infrastructural deficits in
order to establish the administrative, physical, and technological
conditions necessary for FAIRness:
• Well documented, clear, and accessible policies for a transparent, accessible,
and sustainable NCA Archives
• physical preservation and access:
• New storage spaces for current and future collections and equipment
• Bigger search room facilities adequate for large format documents/more researchers
• ongoing relocation of the archives to the main historic block of the NCA campus.
• open and uninterrupted internet access for all

6. TRUST Principles for digital repositories
• Building TRUST to be FAIR (from title of RDA’s P13 session convened by RDA/WDS
Certification of Digital Repositories IG)
• Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability, Technology
(Lin et al. 2020)
• transparent policies and guidelines
• better stewardship and more robust and secure data management
• identifying and fulfilling needs of our user communities
• better governance, planning, and risk mitigation
• updated, appropriate, secure technologies, etc.

8. Challenges
• Historic building documentation domain of architects in Pakistan: tools and methodologies of architectural practice trickling into building
recording.
• Veracity of recording
• Information representation and dissemination
• Data storage
• Ownership
• Conflation of building documentation, interpretation, and architectural intervention when storing and publishing information about
historic buildings
• Difficulty in separating reusable historic building documentation from the design inputs and artistic expressions of the architects
• Introducing FAIR at an architecture, design, and visual art school. Concerns central to social science research not given significance.
• General hurdles: institutional/national infrastructural failures (electricity and internet connectivity interruptions); and lack of government
level legislation and policies tailored specifically for the dissemination of scientific research data; COVID-19 lockdowns; political protests;
extreme weather conditions

9. Centre for Conservation and Restoration Studies
(CCRS)
• Established as a ‘documentation centre’ in 2003; now defunct due to
multiple changes of administration and loss of interest
• Located in the Walled City; owned by NCA
• Opportunity for standardizing historic building documentation
through training and curriculum development
• Proposed merger with NCA Archives to consolidate databases and
resources
• Not just a repository, can also influence how documentation is
created; introducing concerns about data reuse at point of creation.

10. Non-exhaustive list of historic building
documentation types at NCA Archives
• Photographs (physical and scanned TIFFs)
• Slides and negatives
• Architecture student thesis sheets
• Original blueprints (not yet digitized)
• Portfolios featuring architectural ornamentation at historic sites
• Historic building manually drafted documentation (including
watercolours)
• DWGs and photographs (at CCRS)

11. To be Reusable:
R1. meta(data) are richly
described with a plurality of
accurate and relevant attributes
R1.1. (meta)data are released
with a clear and accessible data
usage license
R1.2. (meta)data are associated
with detailed provenance
Uncatalogued photographs: assorted (left), Leghari Haveli (right)

12. Crowdsourcing for metadata
• alumni & professional networks
• to identify building
• to locate author
• paradata
• establish provenance
• enrichment by
linking/incorporating associated
metadata/data not deposited at
the NCA Archives

13. •R1.3. (meta)data meet domain-relevant community
standards
₋ formats, vocabularies, etc.
₋ paradata at time of data creation or deposition?
•User focus (from the TRUST principles)
₋ identifying users: architects, conservationists, local communities,
teachers, researchers
₋ local or national

14. Courtesy Soban Mir (B.Arch 2019)

15. • Need for paradata to identify accuracy of building recording
• DWG format
• Open but proprietary
• Most easily reusable for architects and architecture students
• Inaccessible for some users
• PDF: popular and human readable
• Purpose of reusing documentation: illustrative or to be used for
conservation/adaptive reuse interventions?

16. UCH Tomb Complex
• Set of 23 large format drawings
made by Department of Architecture
students in 1987
• Community standards
• What level of inaccuracy is
acceptable?
• How to we record inaccuracy?
• Digitization: DWGs only where we
can verify accuracy of recording?

17. How reusable should a drawing be?
• raster or vector?
• DWG, SVG, PNG or PDF?

18. CCRS database: recorded as they should be
not as they are.

19. Going forward…
• COVID-19 highlighted inadequacies of the IT Department. Opportunity to
decentralize IT management. Transitional phase in many other aspects as
well.
• Opportunities:
• Increased interest by Government of Pakistan in digital knowledge production
(Digital Pakistan, etc.)- not yet contacted
• student engagement and training
• Once merger/restructuring of CCRS and NCA Archives is finalized, opportunity to
combine resources (and address FAIRness at point of building recording):
• Equipment (total stations and laser scanner for more accuracy, etc.)
• Expands ambit: greater engagement with students and external experts and access to funding
• Disadvantages: regional collaboration not possible at the moment

20. • Thank you!