The junior students of GAU Faculty of Education- Turkish Teaching Department have commenced a work in regards to communal services course which involved classification and transferring of data, which belongs to TRNC Presidency National Archive Department, to digital storage.

42 junior students from Turkish Teaching Department have received their certificate of appreciation for their intense and sensitive efforts and contributions, under the Communal Services course in 2014-2015 Academic Years, since the beginning of the semester.

GAU Lecturer Zeki Akçam has stated that the work was undertaken under four main categories which was; firstly the transfer of old journals and written scripts from the microfilm section to digital environment, secondly the classification of special collections which were donated to mapping section and National Archive and subsequently the relevant documents were donated to Dipkarpaz Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Middle School.

Folloing this, Akçam reports that the works for establishing the first “official verbal culture archive” in TRNC has been commenced and that they have completed the initial classifications of the monographic works which had been ongoing since 2004 and thus at the end of two years almost 7000 minutes long of archive will be shared for the researches to benefit. Akçam also calling out to the public who wish to contribute for the verbal collection and underlined that “we seek all those people who wish to contribute to Cypriot Turkish community’s verbal and written culture through documents, scripts and similar informative.”

Nearly 700 novel and fable types of books which were detected upon the classification realized in the National Archive were donated to Dipkarpaz Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Middle School.

Akçam continued his statement and remarked that the non-thesis undergraduate students of Turkish Language and Literature Teaching are separately conducting another project by visiting the department archive twice a week to enumerate the documents and transfer the most to digital database which was resulted after 100 hours of work. Akçam emphasized that the work will continue during the spring semester and that students will be presented with their internship certificates in return of this task. Akçam underlined the significance of students to gain experience in their fields and the new project of classification and transferring the data into digital storage will be realized for the Ottoman Turkish documents under the “Department of Ottoman”.

The Director of National Archive Gökhan Şengör has also remarked that their initial aim is to teach the student about the contents of archive duties and also the knowledge of accessing the knowledge. Şengör emphasizing on the shortness of the number of people employed at the archive, has underlined the significance of the contribution made by the GAU students in means of overcoming hardship. Furthermore Şengör have thanked each one of GAU students for contributing for the department during moving of the building and to vast scope of reorganization.

Şengür finally presented “certificates of appreciation” to the students for their support and contributions and also Lecturer and the project coordinator Zeki Akçam was also presented with a plaque of appreciation.