Scientific documentation from February 20

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:  The scientific documentation of the treasure unearthed from the vaults of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple here, will commence on February 20.A joint meeting of the expert panel headed M V Nair and the monitoring panel headed by Justice M N Krishnan, which met here on Thursday also assessed the results of a trial run carried ahead of the actual evaluation.Nair said that the trail run conducted with the help of the high-end gadgets supplied by Keltron was a success.“There was a trial run of the documentation process which was monitored by us. On a given day, only 20 items can be documented at one go. The modern equipment supplied by Keltron will be used for evaluation of the temple treasure,” he said.He said that a report about the trail run would be submitted to the Supreme Court on February 15, ahead of the evaluation process. Also, the technical experts would participate in the documentation of the temple riches.The entire proceedings would be recorded using high-end cameras and under foolproof security. Nair said that in the first phase only the documentation of the temple wealth would be conducted and in the second phase the evaluation of the temple wealth would start.The high-end gadgets include karatmeter which is a fast and accurate tool for the measurement of precious metals and finished jewellery. It successfully determines the elemental composition of all gold alloys, platinum group metals and silver alloys.The Digital Archiving of Temple Antiques (DATA) has been installed to ensure that there was no manual intervention.The main aim of creating computerised inventory is to store information about every item in the temple treasure, which could be retrieved easily in an efficient manner.  DATA will also help to categorise the temple treasure into three as directed by the Supreme Court.