US group preserves fading memories of Partition

Thousands of people from across the world have rallied to collect the moving stories of one of the greatest migrations after South Asia's 1947 Partition and the birth of two nations — India and Pakistan.
Helping to preserve the history of that tragic event is a small team of volunteers based at the University of California in Berkeley and their newly founded organisation, The 1947 Partition Archive.
The group uses web-based "crowdsourcing" to record and preserve witness oral histories.
Over the last year, nearly 500 individuals from over 20 countries trained as citizen historians through free online workshops and submitted nearly 1,000 video interviews ranging in length from 1 to 9 hours for preservation.
"Because we are huge believers in grassroots and crowdsourcing, we wanted to take that route. This way, anybody from anywhere can contribute," says the founder, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, who left a research position at Berkeley in December 2012 to volunteer full time for the project.
Through their grassroots effort, The 1947 Partition Archive hopes to train up to 1,000 citizen historians and preserve 3,000 witness accounts in 2014.
With the witnesses of the traumatic events of partition largely in their 80s and 90s, the 1947 Partition Archive collected $35,000 through a crowd funding campaign through international crowdfunding site IndieGoGo, to better equip itself for the task.