INDOLOGY > Links

Digital Art and Manuscript Images from pre-modern South Asia

• [Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts from the Wellcome Library]

  A new ordering system for microfilm, paper, or digital copies of selected Sanskrit manuscripts from the [Oriental Collections] of the [Wellcome Library], London

• [The Digital Library of India]

  Some 30,000 books and manuscripts in various Indian languages and English have already been digitised as part of the project, says Dr Balakrishnan. While a good proportion of the books that have been digitised so far are in English and Telugu, books in languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu and Kannada have also been scanned. In some cases, especially in the case of ancient palm leaf manuscripts, only a few people know the dialect, says Dr Balakrishnan. In such instances, audio files of the manuscripts have been prepared to make it easier to refer to such documents, he adds.

• [The Digital Library of India (New)]

  The mission is to create a portal for the Digital Library of India which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Digital Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, predominantly in Indian languages, available to everyone over the Internet. This portal will also become an aggregator of all the knowledge and digital contents created by other digital library initiatives in India. Very soon we expect that this portal would provide a gateway to Indian Digital Libraries in science, arts, culture, music, movies, traditional medicine, palm leaves and many more. ...

• [The Muktabodha Indological Reasearch Institute]

  Muktabodha is pleased to announce the opening of the Muktabodha Digital Library Website with 74 volumes of the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies (KSTS). These texts were originally published as printed books in Sanskrit by the Government of Jammu and Kashmir State, India in the first half of the last century.

  Update: Now includes the 1,144 paper Saiva transcripts from the UNESCO Memory of the World collection of the French Institute of Pondicherry, as photographic facsimiles integrated into a searchable catalog.

• [The Wellcome Library, London]

  • Digitized images of selected leaves from a manuscript in Devanagari from the Indic collections of the [Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine], London

    • [A Sanskrit manuscript of the Bhâskara's Lîlâvatî]

    • [A Sanskrit manuscript of the Yogsûtras of Patañjali]

    • [A Sanskrit Manuscript of the Isa Upanisad]

  • [The Wellcome Medical Photo Library]

    Keyword searching for subjects etc. Try, e.g., ``Sanskrit'', which brings up lots of digital images of Skt. MSS. Downloadable, but watermarked.

• [New materials from the University of Tübingen, Germany]

  Made available through ``e-ternals.com: digitising and publishing our cultural heritage'':

  The University Library at Tübingen (ULT) has started publishing some significant new manuscripts, including the famous Atharva-Veda manuscript from the University Library (PaippalAda recension/Kashmir, SAradA script, birch bark, very large, beautiful manuscript). Please check out the updated [www.e-ternals.com] site.

  Also available now: a hitherto unpublished manuscript, probably by Nampillai. The Tattva-viveka by Pillai Lokacharya is now also available in full resolution quality, for libraries, archives and people with really huge machines... In future, ULT will publish as much as we can in two versions:

  (1) Full-resolution (up to 400 MB per image), for libraries, archives, museums, research centres,

  (2) Multimedia-enhanced versions with our special manuscript-reading software, resolution reduced in such a way that individual fibres can be seen, but not almost microscopic like the full resolution. This version loads pages very fast, even from the CD, and contains software for zooming in and out very swiftly, moving the page on the screen, turning pages, etc.

  We are now also starting to publish meta-data, transliterations/transcriptions, translations, critical editions and secondary literature. This will include some so far unpublished works by Rudolph Roth, also held in the University Library of Tübingen.

• [The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art]

  A Photographic Research and Teaching Archive, the Archive contains nearly 300,000 original color slides and black and white and color photographs of art and architecture throughout Asia. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar (Burma). Works range from approximately 2500 B.C.E. to the present, and documentation includes contemporary religious activities in various parts of Asia.

• [Manuscript resources for South Asian Studies]

  SARAI pages on Indic manuscripts provided by Columbia University, New York. Includes images and queries about unidentified MSS (updated 26/3/2001)

• [The BL/UW Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project]

  British Library / University of Washington site on the study, editing, and publication of a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of 1st century CE Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language that were acquired by the British Library in 1994.

• [Institute for Asian Studies, Madras]

  UNESCO project to preserve Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts.

• [University of Pennsylvania Library]

  Center for Electronic Texts and Images

  A collection of digitized Sanskrit manuscripts from the Penn Library collections. Includes links to Persian and other S. Asian manuscripts.

  The site was formerly hosted at http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/sasia/skt-mss/ but it has been moved to a new "oldsite" web address, and is no longer maintained.

• [IIAS / University of Pennsylvania Library]

  Center for Electronic Texts and Images: Indic Slide Collection

  A collection of digitized slides from the AIIS/Penn Library collections.

• [KiraNa Vyaakhyaa] MS text transcribed in ASCII, with digital images of pages, by Jun Takashima.

• [Asian Arts]

  Journal of Asian Arts, including many images of paintings from South Asia, Nepal, Tibet, etc.

• [India Today]

  Article from 28 September 1998 issue about Sanskrit MS collections in Bhubaneshwar.