In a fair number of Punjab villages there is one person who has written a history of it: usually a retired schoolmaster, sometimes a granthi, occasionally a doctor or a soldier back from service.
These are typed or handwritten, sometimes printed locally in a run of a few hundred, and they contain the village's founding tradition, its gots, its notable men, its gurdwara's history, its war dead and its land disputes.
They are almost never catalogued, deposited anywhere, or known outside the village. When the author dies the copies scatter.
The same applies to community and caste histories, published locally in Punjabi, and to family histories printed for a wedding or a memorial.
This is a substantial body of local historical writing, produced by Punjabis about Punjab in Punjabi, that no library holds and no bibliography lists.
Collecting them would take a public appeal and a shelf, and it would produce more material about Punjab's villages than exists in any institution.
There are people doing this already: schoolteachers writing village histories, retired officials compiling got genealogies, photographers documenting shrines, and a scattering of local historical societies.
The work is almost all self published, in Punjabi, in small print runs, and it does not reach a library or a catalogue.
Collecting what already exists would be a substantial project on its own, and it would have to be done now, because these books exist in single copies in their authors' houses.