Electronic texts, irt Jan Dvorak.

[Dominik Wujastyk]

A "union list" of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian, Tamil, or other e-texts
would be extremely useful.  But it would also be a pretty labour-intensive
task.  My experience with such projects is that they are hardest and most
interesting at the beginning, but after keeping up with the field for a
year or two it can become less interesting.  However, the initial work
done on such a union list would be extremely important and of great
general interest.  I would be delighted to host such a list on the
INDOLOGY web site.

Another possibility is for all e-texts to be systematically submitted to
an institutionally-funded site such as the Oxford Text Archive or the
Rutgers Center for Electronic Texts.  These places have paid staff who
catalogue and manage e-texts.  That would be ideal.  All texts would
probably be normalized into SGML (TEI) format, which would be fine.  One
drawback would be that such authorities have to be very pernickety about
copyright, and some of the texts which we cheerfully exchange with
each other might turn out to be infringing others' copyright.  The present
rather laissez-faire situation does not properly address these issues,
which is not to say that they may not become more prominent in the future.

If we are going to submit all texts to, say, the OTA, I could certainly
act as one conduit for such submissions.

--
Dominik Wujastyk
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, England.
FAX +44-171-611-8545
email: d.wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk
WWW: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw