[INDOLOGY] 3-year position within the Qalamos cataloguing project at the Bavarian State Library

[Roland Steiner]

  Christoph Rauch (Head of the Oriental Department, State Library  
Berlin) has asked me to send the following message to the list.

Best regards,
Roland Steiner

* * *

Dear Prof Wujastyk, dear readers,
I would like to comment briefly on your post on the job announcement  
of the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
The Qalamos[1] project has been running for three years with the  
support of the DFG. The goal is to create records of all Oriental  
manuscripts preserved in German institutions. This is done by  
retroconversion of printed catalogs but also by integration of  
existing electronic catalogs such as KOHD-Digital[2].
In recent years, the focus has been on Islamic manuscripts. We now  
hope to create metadata of similar quality for South Asian manuscript  
traditions by 2026.
Qalamos does not run on Aleph, but on a MyCoRe[3] repository. I cannot  
address here the BSB's peculiarity of primarily recording its own  
holdings in the classical library catalog, but all data will finally  
be integrated in Qalamos.
We welcome suggestions, ideas and exchange with the  
South-Asian-Studies-community!
 
Kind regards
Christoph
------------------------------------
Christoph Rauch
Head of the Oriental Department
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz -
Potsdamer Str. 33
D-10785 Berlin
Tel +49-(0)30-266 43 5800
https://spk-berlin.webex.com/meet/christoph.rauch
christoph.rauch at sbb.spk-berlin.de[4]
http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
https://www.qalamos.net 
https://od-portal.hypotheses.org/
 

* * *

----- Nachricht von Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY  
<indology at list.indology.info[4]> ---------
     Datum: Mon, 3 Jul 2023 18:23:33 +0200
       Von: Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info[4]>
Antwort an: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com[4]>
   Betreff: Re: [INDOLOGY] 3-year position within the Qalamos  
cataloguing project at the Bavarian State Library
        An: vincent.tournier at lmu.de[4]
        Cc: indology at list.indology.info[4]

> Oh dear.  They're retro-cataloguing into Aleph, an obsolete,  
> flat-file library system from the 1980s.  What a waste of time and  
> effort, creating yet another ghetto of non-linked, unintelligent  
> data.  Manuscripts /are not printed books/. Every manuscript is a  
> unique antiquity.  Library systems are not the right tool for the job.
>     
>    May I say clearly for all to hear.  Information concerning  
> manuscripts, the literary works they supprt, locations, authors,  
> scribes and owners should be recorded in a normalized[5] relational  
> database system.  Ideally, there should also be XML import and  
> export (report) facilities, or the whole database may be an XML  
> system.
>     
>    A model for how to do this properly is the PanditProject[5].    
> There is, in fact, no reason that the Bayerische SB shouldn't  
> retrospectively catalogue their Indian manuscripts into  
> PanditProject itself.  That would actually be of huge immediate  
> value to the international academic community of S. Asia scholars.   
> But an institution of the SB's size is probably too rule-bound and  
> inflexible to consider such a procedure.
>     
>    Best,
>    Dominik Wujastyk
>    University of Alberta
>     
>     

----- Ende der Nachricht von Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY  
<indology at list.indology.info[4]> -----


Links:
------
[1] https://www.qalamos.net/
[2] https://orient-mss.kohd.adw-goe.de/content/index.xml
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyCoRe
[4]
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
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