[Digital Art and Manuscript Images from pre-modern South Asia
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Ninety-one Jaina manuscripts beautifully digitized and described. Exceptionally good metadata. The manuscripts are from libraries such as the British Library, the Wellcome Library, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Bodleian Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
[A project to digitize palm-leaf manuscripts in Myanmar]
The project was begun in February 2013 with the following aims to:
- help preserve Myanmar’s heritage of texts (principally Buddhist texts),
- make photos of texts available for free to scholars all over the world,
- help raise the awareness in Myanmar of the value of manuscripts and early editions of texts,
- train people in Myanmar to care for manuscripts and books and take over the work of digitizing them. -- Bill Pruitt
[Ordering system for digitized MSS from the Anandashrama Sanstha library in Pune.]
[Digitized MS collection at the Chunilal Gandhi Vidyabhavan, Surat.]
"There are three collections in the institute. They have been scanned and the pdf files thereof have been put online for the use of scholars by kind consent of the educational institute holding them (Sarvajanik Education Society). The details of catalogues are as follows:"
- Shivadatta Shukla alias Prakashanandanatha collection - 1598 manuscripts
- Shastri Dinamanishankara collection - 960 manuscripts
- Prof. V. R. Trivedi collection - 27 manuscripts
MSS also at Archive.org:
- Collection of scanned Chunilal Gandhi Vidyabhavan MSS at Archive.org Ca. 2500 MSS.
"Majority of the manuscripts have been uploaded. Remaining are in the process of upload."
NB: Not behind a paywall.
[Digitized MS collection at the Royal Asiatic Society, London.]
NB: Not behind a paywall.
[Digitized MS collection at the Asiatic Society, Mumbai.]
NB: Behind a paywall.
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[Indian Manuscripts dot com website by Madan Mohan Gupta]
Many well-scanned manuscripts of unknown provenance. Apparently in Madhya Pradesh. Several MSS and books are stamped "Maharajah of Rewah" (PYS p. 87)
NB website offline as of February 2019.
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[Lalchand Research Library, DAV College, Sector 10, Chandigarh]
"Out of the 8360 manuscripts in this collection, as at present, 6462 are written in Devanagari script and the remaining 1898 in other scripts as per inventory that follows: - South Indian - Grantha 919, Andhra 404, Malayalam 290, Nandi Nagari 46, Tamil 15, Kannad 2 and Vartula (Circular) 1; - North Indian – Sarada 197, Utkala 17 and Banga 7."
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See further notes at the eGangotri blog entry. See also the 2005 published catalogue of the collection.
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[Digitized manuscripts from an unknown uploader nicknamed "I_am_visionary_tunes."]
See also archive.org, another copy at catalogues.indology.info, Biswas 0401).
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[Digitized manuscripts from the Raghunatha Temple Library, Jammu]
Results of the eGangotri digitizing project carried out by Chetan Pandey. Copyright permission granted by the MS owners, Dharmartha Trust.
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[Cambridge Digital Library: Sanskrit Manuscripts]
[...] the AHRC-funded project The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge has begun a systematic investigation aiming to produce a full catalogue of the manuscripts and to digitise a substantial proportion of them. These comprise more than 1,600 works in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Tamil and other ancient and medieval South Asian languages, produced over a time-span of more than 1,000 years, and written in over a dozen scripts and on different writing materials, such as paper, palm leaf and birch bark. The project has provided further information on the conventions used in these manuscript descriptions.
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[Digitized Sanskrit manuscripts on ayurveda, rasaśāstra and tantra Gujarat Ayurvedic University]
A clunky interface, but the materials are excellent.
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[Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts from the Wellcome Library]
Indic and other manuscripts from the [Asian Collections] of the [Wellcome Library], London. The reproduction services have a cap on all purchases of £100.
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[The Digital Library of India]
This has now (2014) become a huge and valuable resource.
Many books from this site, as well as Google Books etc., have also appeared at The Archive where they can be easier to access.
For downloading whole books as a PDF file, I recommend DLI Downloader
NoteAs of mid 2014, the URL has moved from www.new.dli.ernet.in (2012) back to its earlier URL, www.dli.gov.
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[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.
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[The Wellcome Library, London]
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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
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[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, and freely usable under Creative Commons license..
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[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.
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[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.
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[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)
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[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.
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[Institute for Asian Studies, Madras]
UNESCO project to preserve Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts.
[University of Pennsylvania Library's "Penn In Hand" project]
"The site offers bibliographic information and digital facsimiles for selected collections of manuscript codices, texts, documents, papers, and leaves held by Penn's Rare Book & Manuscript Library...." This includes descriptions of over 2500 Indic manuscripts, most of them with freely-viewable online digital facsimiles.
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[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 was moved to a new "oldsite" web address a few years ago (around 2004?), and was no longer maintained publicly. Recently (2009/20010) it has returned to its former, public, home. -
[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.
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[KiraNa Vyaakhyaa] MS text transcribed in ASCII, with digital images of pages, by Jun Takashima.
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Journal of Asian Arts, including many images of paintings from South Asia, Nepal, Tibet, etc.
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Article from 28 September 1998 issue about Sanskrit MS collections in Bhubaneshwar.
Last modified: Fri Feb 7 15:07:31 2020
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