[INDOLOGY] Final Developments Concerning GRETIL

[Maximilian Mehner]

Dear list members,

in light of last week’s discussion on the sustainability of digital projects, I would like to share some important updates - or more precisely: final developments - regarding GRETIL.

The directors of the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) have been approached by the German Oriental Society (DMG), Dominik Wujastyk and myself on multiple occasions. We all emphasised the significance of GRETIL as a service and appealed for its continued support. Regrettably, it has become clear that the only form of institutional backing they are willing to provide is for the long-term preservation of the data.

Fortunately, this responsibility has been entrusted to a colleague with a background in digital humanities, José Calvo Tello, who has a genuine interest in enhancing the corpus. He even managed to employ a PhD student of the Indology department, David Herting, for a couple of weeks. 

The announcement we are circulating reads as follows:

Over the course of the last months we at the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) have been working on the migration of the the Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (GRETIL) to a new platform and we are now very happy to announce that GRETIL has found a new home in the TextGrid repository:
 
https://textgridrep.org/project/TGPR-2ba9cb1b-9602-202d-71ce-67e63a29de55
 
In its current state there are still some irregularities concerning the rendering of certain elements, but these are being worked on. We would nevertheless be very glad to kindly invite you to test out GRETIL in this new environment.
 
Please note that from a content perspective GRETIL is regarded as a closed project by the SUB. This means that we, unfortunately, do not have resources to add new texts or to make philological emendations to the existing material. Any feedback should therefore be limited to technical errors only. If, however, you are working on specific collections of Indic material, the SUB will be able to assist you in integrating your work into the TextGrid repository as a new project and thus integrating it in the same repository that contains GRETIL. You can reach out to:

José Calvo Tello, calvotello at sub.uni-goettingen.de
 
for your technical feedback.
 
The old GRETIL website is still online and will be available at least until the end of the year. The new GRETIL in TextGrid also offers the old cumulative ZIP file downloads in its previous form (now integrated into the DARIAH-DE Repository).The GRETIL e-library will soon be available on the edocs server of the Göttingen University (https://edocs.sub.uni-goettingen.de/).
 
In the Pali collection, we were not able to migrate the digital facsimiles of the Pali Text Society editions due to the special layout requirements of these texts. Please do reach out to us, if you want to work with us on this issue.
 
We have presented an in depth explanation of our work and GRETIL in TextGrid during the poster session of the DARIAH annual event in Göttingen, on June 19, https://annualevent.dariah.eu/programme/ . The poster can be seen at https://zenodo.org/records/15828259

We will also be presenting at the 35th Deutscher Orientalistentag DOT 2025, Erlangen, Septembre 9, 11:30-12:00, in the session on long-term archiving of DH projects.
 
 With this migration to TextGrid we are sincerely hoping to offer GRETIL a sustainable and connected future, so it can continue to be useful for the scholarly community.
 
Best regards,
David Herting
José Calvo Tello 
Maximilian Mehner