Digitising a museum collection is often framed as a technical challenge. Procure high-resolution cameras and scanners, hire trained photographers and scanning technicians, build databases and upload images to the cloud.
In Pakistan, however, museum, archive and heritage digitisation is as much about navigating governance structures, institutional histories and professional anxieties as it is about the technology being used.
For more than two decades, the Lahore Museum has not been led by a museum professional. For the past 16 years, the Taxila Museum has lacked authority over the majority of its reserve collection. During those same periods, specialised expertise in collections management, conservation and museum documentation have steadily eroded across much of the country’s cultural sector.
The result is that projects that should primarily be about technology have become exercises in navigating institutional uncertainty. The recent digitisation of the Lahore and Taxila Museums demonstrates how the success of a digital archive depends not only on cameras and computers but on the people and institutions responsible for the collections themselves.
While the digitisation process of the Lahore and Taxila museums is helping preserve thousands of priceless artefacts, it has also revealed the bureaucratic failures, institutional neglect and governance challenges that have long threatened the nation's cultural heritage
GOING DIGITAL
In early 2024, major work began to digitise the Lahore and Taxila museums, its scope of work becoming Pakistan’s largest museum digitisation project. The ambition was straightforward — create a comprehensive digital record of collections that span millennia of South Asian history.
Combined, these two museums hold a collection that ranges from Gandharan sculptures and Paharri miniatures to colonial-era artefacts and modern art, representing one of the richest cultural and historical archives in the region. Yet, much of this heritage has remained inaccessible, poorly documented and vulnerable to deterioration.
In 2017, the Government of Punjab took a loan from the World Bank to develop its tourism infrastructure, which led to the establishment of the Punjab Tourism for Economic Growth Project (PTEGP). PTEGP’s main task was to develop tourist sites across the province and distribute funding for desperately needed conservation and maintenance work. Digitising the Lahore and Taxila museums became one of its core projects, for which the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) was hired.
Digitisation of the collection, particularly in the case of the Lahore Museum, also meant that it could then go on to its next step: a whole revamp of the museum’s physical infrastructure itself. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) had been in consultation with the museum regarding upgrading efforts, yet a project at such a large scale could not happen until a full inventory of the museum was made.
Time was ticking. Yet, early on, the limitations were not technical but rather political.
WHO OWNS THE COLLECTION?
One would assume that a museum holds complete and unrestricted access to the collection under its roof. But in Pakistan this is not the case.
When digitisation work began at the Taxila Museum, it came to light that, while the collection on display belonged to the provincial Punjab government, the artefacts in the reserve collection — hidden away from the public — were under the domain of the federal government and their Department of Archaeology and Museums (DOAM).
Why this split? In 2010, with the passing of the 18th Amendment and subsequent devolution of ministries to the provinces, several museums that had been established by the federal government or already existed at the time of independence were brought under provincial control.
DOAM and the Punjab Directorate General of Archaeology had simply not yet worked out how the objects in Taxila would be transferred, and personnel of the Taxila Museum employed by the Punjab government were not even allowed access to the reserve collection, unless in the presence of a representative from DOAM.
With this development, it was decided that Taxila’s reserve collection could not be digitised during the project timeline of 11 months.
The Lahore Museum also sits in an unusual administrative arrangement that complicates decision-making. The museum is managed by a board of governors and does not come under either the federal government or Punjab’s Directorate General of Archaeology.
Instead, it is an “allied department” of the much broader Tourism, Archaeology and Museums (TAM) department of the Government of Punjab, which also manages the Tourism Development Corporation of Punjab (TDCP), the Directorate General of Archaeology Punjab and Punjab’s Department of Tourist Services (DTS Punjab), which are all separate departments. For final administrative matters pertaining to the Lahore Museum then, the highest authority becomes the secretary of TAM.
Therefore, a matter of who to contact and speak with for improvements in either museum is not a very clear process.
This is true for other provinces as well, where the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi is one such case. While the museum first went to the provincial government after the 18th Amendment, it was later brought back under federal control with a directive of the Supreme Court in 2019. Now there are murmurings to bring it back to the province, while plans to develop a new site in Islamabad have remained stalled for years.
BUILDING TRUST
Once it is established who owns the collection (or rather, who is responsible for it), the first and most important step is to build trust with the museum itself. An ambiguous chain of command, ownership and external consultants makes developing trust at all stages necessary.
A sustained lack of funding and attention towards culture and heritage in Pakistan has meant that, when funding is available, several proposals come forth. Digitisation can be a lucrative business, with funding proposals asking for expensive cameras, scanners, computers and editing software, besides the operational costs of salaries and logistics.
A visit to most museums in Pakistan will make one uncomfortable truth obvious, there are very few museum professionals hired in the country. The degradation of Pakistan’s public cultural institutions has meant that the gap in skills and expertise is now vast. Most staff members who are employed to look after museum collections do not have degrees or experience in their collections or museum management, and therefore learn on the job.
One of the most glaring examples of this is that, since 2001, no museum specialist has been hired to head the Lahore Museum. Dr Saifur Rahman Dar was amongst the last, who had brought the museum to international acclaim when he took charge of its directorship in 1974, introducing best practices in museum management and intellectual rigour with collections research.
However, since Dar and his protégé Dr Anjum Rehmani, the Lahore Museum’s director’s office has been occupied by bureaucrats with no background in anthropology, art history or archaeology. For some bureaucrats placed at the museum, it has become a ‘punishment post’ to wait out their next appointment, or an opportunity to take courses for promotion while in Lahore.
From the beginning of the Lahore Museum’s digitisation process in 2024 till the end, four different directors had to be explained the project in its entirety and trust built from scratch. The lack of leadership at the head of the Lahore Museum has greatly impacted its potential as a centre for international cultural exchange and, therefore, any digitisation and upgradation work.
GETTING TECHNICAL
Issues of security, building trust and creating a good working environment for digitisation to take place meant that, at both the Lahore and Taxila museums, it was decided that photographers and scanning technicians could not touch the objects and, instead, only the museum staff could handle the artefacts.
It was also decided that, outside of the museum’s own security cameras, an additional camera would also monitor the digitising stations. Alarmingly, the Taxila Museum did not have working security cameras of its own, and one had to be separately set up, which could send a livestream and record all interactions around the object.
While there is only one curator for the entire museum at Taxila, the Lahore Museum has multiple for the different galleries. A complete collection-wise digitisation calendar had to be made after confirming the availability of both the Lahore Museum’s curatorial and security staff — both had to be present in order for any digitisation efforts to be made. This was true whether in the museum galleries or in the reserve collections, where objects had to be taken out of their cases. It was the same when entering the reserve collections for even a preliminary assessment of the task at hand. With curatorial and security staff already encumbered by many duties, this aspect of digitisation was particularly challenging to overcome in an 11-month timeline.
Digitising also means that a very large amount of data is being generated, which needs to be carefully managed. Each digitised object has multiple photos taken of it. Besides the front-view of the artefact, the back, top, bottom and sides all have to be photographed to create a complete record of the artefact at a particular moment in time. So, for the 35,000 objects that were digitised across both museums, hundreds of thousands of images exist.
Since the project being executed in Lahore and Taxila was managed out of the CAP office in Karachi, from the get-go a data protocol was set where images were sent every fortnight to the team in Karachi. This meant that both Lahore and Taxila had a minimum of two back-ups ‘locally’ on their own locations and had to be in close coordination with the team in Karachi to make sure that data was being sent over on time.
The Karachi office then had to make sure that the data was processed and being kept on both hard drives (that could carry multiple terabytes) and, most importantly, being uploaded on to two separate cloud networks. Keeping it in multiple locations under strict protocol was key to ensure that, in case there was a data compromise — a hard drive was damaged or lost — there existed an entire back-up that would protect all the work that was being done.
Outside of the photographs themselves, there was also the task of creating proper inventory records for the artefacts. Both museums had kept outdated and inefficiently managed records on Excel sheets, within which several discrepancies were identified through the digitisation process.
While some of the museum’s curators decided to amend the descriptions for their collections, others decided to keep the existing ones. For each folder of photos for every artefact, a digital catalogue card was also made, which meant that anyone going through the object photos could easily see its information, instead of having to open different files to check and confirm objects.
CURATING IDEAS
As part of an initiative to kickstart the process of how to get the audience to engage with the digitised collection, a selection of objects from each gallery were curated on temporary interactive screens.
For example, the Paharri school of miniature paintings collection at the Lahore Museum was displayed on a 65-inch touchscreen, where visitors could see on a map the centres where the miniatures were produced, and also enlarge the paintings themselves while reading texts about them. At the entrance of the museum, animations from the miniature paintings collection were placed on vertical screens in front of doors from the Shalimar Bagh, to create an atmosphere of the royal garden.
A favourite of the authors is the digital display for the Sadequain collection. In the early 1970s, Sadequain stayed at the Lahore Museum, using the director’s office as a place to host gatherings and sleeping in what is now the video monitoring room of the museum.
Alongside images of the Sadequain collection, which visitors can zoom into in high resolution, two videos were also produced that speak about Sadequain’s time at the museum — in the words of Dr Saifur Rehman Dar — and the process of conservation of the mural in the museum’s main hall, led by Uzma Usmani, the keeper of contemporary art at the museum.
The curation was an attempt to bridge the gap between audience and artwork, and so artists — including Shahzia Sikander and Salima Hashmi — are centred in short films talking about the development of contemporary art in Pakistan, while Naazish Ataullah speaks about Amrita Sher-Gil’s time in Lahore.
It was also an opportunity to highlight the work of some of Pakistan’s best contemporary artists that show an evolution of the lineage and history contained within the Lahore Museum. Muhammad Zeeshan has created four new paintings inspired by the Lahore Museum collection that are now part of the miniature gallery, and Ali Kazim and Amin Gulgee speak about the influence of Abdur Rehman Chughtai and Ismail Gulgee on Pakistani art. Jawad Sharif directed a film on the craft traditions of Pakistan, which can be witnessed through the ethnographic collections at the Lahore Museum.
Yet, as is the case with most externally funded projects executed by an outside party, a lack of upkeep and maintenance by the beneficiaries, ie the Lahore and Taxila museums, means that the temporary displays will soon lose their charm if not refreshed and re-curated with the digitised collection.
This was not the first digitisation project at the Lahore Museum — attempts had been made at digitising parts of the collection, though not all — and it will surely not be the last. As technology improves globally, and more funding and technical expertise is secured locally, digitisation projects will be executed with a renewed focus.
For example, 3D-scanning of archaeological objects in Pakistan is still very limited, but a cutting-edge project by the Chinese Media Arts Lab (CAMLab) at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been 3D-scanning Gandharan art and, in Pakistan, has scanned sites in Taxila and objects at the Peshawar and Lahore Museums.
OPEN ACCESS
Museums can often view digitisation as potentially undermining their ability to control access to their collections. Yet, international experience suggests that wider digital access can increase rather than diminish institutional relevance.
Not having digitised museum collections be open access is a tragedy that has befallen museum development in Pakistan, since the collections then only become available for those with connections in the department itself, or powerful bureaucratic and political channels.
For example, the Lahore Museum holds a rich and diverse collection reflecting the region’s history, art and heritage. However, visitation to the Lahore Museum, though high by comparative Pakistani museum standards, remains limited. Taxila Museum, similarly, has few visitors, and the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi barely any. The gap in museum visitation and the lack of scholarly work from the museums themselves then means that the artefacts and artworks start losing their value, since there are fewer people who can appreciate them.
Where a student in Swat or a researcher abroad would first have had to navigate travel logistics and bureaucratic complexities to access the collections, the collections being open access would mean that they could now bypass that.
Several leading museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have adopted open access policies for their digitised collections, with highly positive results in outreach and impact. The Lahore and Taxila museums can adopt a similar approach by:
Publishing their digitised collection online in high resolution, with descriptive metadata;
Allowing non-commercial reuse of these digital assets under a creative commons (CC) license or a similar framework;
Collaborating with educational and cultural institutions to promote the use of these resources for the public benefit.
KEEPING IT SAFE
In the summer of 2001, scandal shook the Lahore Museum. A theft of five rare manuscripts led to the removal of officiating director Dr Anjum Rehmani. A two-year long inquiry ultimately led to the exoneration, but censure, of Rehmani by the then-chief secretary Punjab (also the head of the board of governors of the Lahore Museum), who conducted a personal hearing.
Of course, had the objects been digitised and it had been publicly known that they belonged to the Lahore Museum, selling them to a private collector, auction house or museum abroad would have been impossible. In an astonishing amount of luck, one of the manuscripts, a copy of the Holy Quran written on deer skin — said to be from the period of Hazrat Imam Hussain (AS) — was recovered when an individual brought it to the Lahore Museum itself to determine its value! The individual was arrested, along with a doctor, who police claimed were part of a network of smugglers.
Digitisation also ultimately becomes an institutional audit. In 2023, the discovery of large-scale thefts at the British Museum led it to dramatically increase its digitisation efforts. The British Museum pledged to digitise 2.4 million objects within a period of five years, with an estimated cost of £10 million (Rs3.7 billion).
After the thefts were first confirmed, the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, had to step down, and interim director Mark Jones said in a statement, “It is my belief that the single-most important response to the thefts is to increase access, because the better a collection is known — and the more it is used — the sooner any absences are noticed.”
Outside of thefts, there is also the ever-present danger of the elements. The Lahore and Taxila museums both have suffered from extensive water damage from leaking pipes and rainfall, and harsh lighting and poor ventilation continue to damage objects.
However, the most heartbreaking destruction of a museum in recent years was by a fire at the National Museum of Brazil in September 2018, caused by a short circuit of an air-conditioning unit. It was estimated that, out of 20 million artefacts, 92 percent of them were destroyed. Only 10 percent of the total collection had been digitised, which meant that millions of objects are gone forever.
THE FUTURE OF PAKISTAN’S MUSEUMS
In the context of the Lahore Museum, digitisation was also of critical importance given that the museum is on the brink of a major upgrade. With any infrastructural changes to museums and art galleries, collections have to be moved from the site with great care and sensitivity to avoid damage and even theft. A lack of digitising and proper record-keeping creates risks that delay much-needed engineering and conservation work taking place.
Plans to develop the Lahore Museum and bring it to a state more befitting its collection have been in the process for several years. In February 2025, Chief Minister of Punjab Maryam Nawaz instructed the provincial cabinet to approve $8 million (Rs2 billion) for Unesco to carry out major upgradation work at the Lahore Museum, a plan nearly a decade in the making, with a team of both national and international experts.
Incidentally, in August 2025, a pre-qualification notice tender of Rs3.6 billion ($13 million) was released by the Infrastructure and Development Authority of the Punjab (IDAP) for the engineering, procurement and construction of the Lahore Museum master plan. In November 2025, another pre-qualification notice tender of Rs2.5 billion ($9 million) was issued.
Besides bureaucratic negligence, the Lahore Museum in its original design by John Lockwood Kipling and Bhai Ram Singh, and engineering by Sir Ganga Ram, had ceilings that were prone to damage and leakages by rainfall, and the Unesco upgradation includes plans to abate the waterlogging, and overall improve issues of dampness, electricity and fire safety. IDAP has also shared proposals to further increase the museum space by adding a tunnel that would connect Tollinton Market (site of the original museum) with the present museum space.
It is still unknown how long the museum will remain closed for, but the upgrade provides a stellar opportunity for the museum and Unesco to develop interactive and online displays using the digitised images. It will be the only way with which the Lahore Museum will stay alive for visitors, both nationally and for those abroad.
Likewise, archaeological sites at Taxila and the Taxila Museum have received, in April 2026, a budget of nearly Rs4 billion ($14 million) from the Punjab government for major upgradation works. In February 2026, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) provided 48.8 million Japanese Yen (Rs88.8 million) for conservation work and exhibition display, from which funds will likely be directed to maintaining and digitising the reserve collection.
Digitising national collections such as at the Lahore and Taxila museums shows that, to begin any major museum project in Pakistan, it is necessary to create institutions that are capable of managing collections and maintaining records, while having a forward-thinking approach to curation.
Pakistan is embarking on major investments in its museums, archaeological sites and heritage tourism, and the long-term success of these projects will depend on rebuilding the professional expertise needed to sustain them. Without such critical interventions, Pakistan may commit to digitisation and infrastructural works, but will never strengthen the institutions responsible for safeguarding our heritage.
Saeed Husain is Managing Editor of Folio Books
and served as Project Manager of the digital
curation of the Lahore and Taxila museums.
He can be reached at www.saeedhusain.com
Noor Ahmed is the curator of the Karachi Biennale
2027 and served as Project Director of the digital
curation of the Lahore and Taxila museums.
She can be reached at www.noorbahmed.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, July 19th, 2026