Cataloging, Digitizing, and Integrating the Houghton Library's Indic Manuscript Collection

FAIN: PW-51273-13

Sanskrit Library (Providence, RI 02906-4629)
Peter M. Scharf (Project Director: July 2012 to March 2017)

Cataloging of up to 1,700 Sanskrit manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University for future digitization and integration into a digital library of Sanskrit. Ultimately, about 75,000 manuscript pages would be made searchable together with Sanskrit-English lexica and other linguistic tools developed for analysis of machine-readable texts.

The proposed project aims to enhance access to primary cultural heritage materials of India housed in American libraries by integrating them with digital texts, lexical resources, and linguistic software in a digital library of Sanskrit, one of the world's richest culture-bearing languages. Integrating primary cultural materials with the Sanskrit Library will enable broad use of Indic collections for research and education. The project catalogs all the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University as the first phase of a larger project to catalogue, digitize and integrate them with corresponding digital texts in the Sanskrit Library. The result serves as a model for collections of Indic materials throughout the U.S. and the world, and for digitization projects of cultural materials in other major culture-bearing languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.