Digital archiving of tributes to Mr Lee Kuan Yew underway
SINGAPORE — Work has begun on the digital archiving of tributes that members of the public left for the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew and the process is estimated to take until the end of the year to complete.
Over 65,000 articles have been processed since April 20, with more than 50 volunteers and staff of the National Library Board involved every day.
Telling how far along they are is tough though, because the boxes upon boxes of articles have not been sorted while some tributes are also continuing to trickle in nearly three months after Mr Lee died on March 23.
The tribute articles collected from the Istana, Parliament House, Community Tribute sites and public libraries come in all shapes and sizes, from handwritten notes and photo montages, to Chinese couplets and paper cranes, and even child footprints. There are also drawings of Mr Lee, or his likeness on trophies and plagues. The tributes are written in Singapore’s four languages, and also in Japanese, Vietnamese and other international languages.
The archiving involves first sorting the articles by language, size and whether the tribute features a special encounter with Mr Lee, for example. They are then scanned or photographed, and indexed.
The archived materials are uploaded onto the irememberLeeKuanYew Collection on the Singapore Memory Project portal (http://www.singaporememory.sg/campaigns/irememberleekuanyew), which is an NLB project that serves as the nation’s collector of Singapore’s memories.
Today (June 8), Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim visited the archiving centre to thank volunteers and staff. He said: “If we are able to digitise these (tributes), the most important legacy that we are able to leave behind is for future generations to understand what Mr Lee and the founding fathers stood for to build the city that we have today.”
Speaking to the youth volunteers, Dr Yaacob said: “I hope as you go through (the tributes), you glean some of the values that Mr Lee and the founding fathers stood for, because these are the kind of values that we need going forward.”
One of the volunteers, Secondary One student Sandy Pratama, said he got involved because he had missed the mourning period due to a family holiday. “I wanted to see what the letters are like and how (the people) felt,” said the 13-year-old.
