Manuscript archiving in Germany

THIS IMPORTANT PROJECT involves "archiving" in the sense of cataloging. So far it is a print publication, not available digitally. The bold emphasis below is mine.

Mammoth project to archive manuscripts

May 14 2013 at 09:19am
By ANDREAS HUMMEL (iol scitech)

Jena, Germany - After more than 50 years of meticulous work, German specialists say the end is in sight for efforts to make previously unregistered manuscripts in scripts and languages of Asia, the Middle East and Africa accessible through printed catalogues.

If all goes well and continued financing can be secured, the mammoth project may be completed in 2022.

Extensive collections of what are termed “oriental” manuscripts can be found in German libraries. Many books in the Arab world were laboriously copied by hand until the 20th century, when printing had long been established elsewhere.

The Berlin State Library owns the largest collection of oriental manuscripts and blockprints in Germany: about 42 000 items in all.

Proposed by German orientalists in 1957, the Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections (known by its German abbreviation, KOHD) has been a research project of the Goettingen Academy of Sciences since 1990.

KOHD has so far published more than 140 volumes of catalogues as well as studies dealing with specific manuscripts.

Researchers at the University of Jena in eastern Germany specialise in Arabic manuscripts.

At other German universities, Old Turkic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, Persian, Uigur, Indian, Hebrew, Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese manuscripts and the like are being studied.

[...]

Due to copyright restrictions, digitising the catalogues originally published in book form has not yet been possible, which “hinders their availability via the Internet,” she said.

So as to catalogue all of the multitudinous manuscripts, only key information is briefly noted for about 90 per cent of them.

“People who want to know more have to go to the respective library or order digital images,” Seidensticker said. “Texts that especially stand out are described in more detail.”

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