I can personally attest to how useful Dominik's archive.org reviews are! They've saved me a lot of work in the past.

What's more, with the IIIF service that archive.org provides, together with the open source tools we're putting together as part of the Texts Surrounding Texts Project, you can easily put together your own descriptive catalogue of material on archive.org. Here is a detailed catalogue entry I just made, of a digitized manuscript from Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri National Sanskrit University:

https://tst-project.github.io/mss/SLBSNS_02_04_322.xml

There is really a lot of material out there now, it's pretty great!

PS Thanks for bringing up this topic, giving me a chance to advertise...

Best,

Charles

In a small way, I've been keeping collection-level links here: https://indology.info/external-resources/   , i.e., identifiably individual collections living at archive.org.  But there's a tremendous amount more than what I've noted.

The metadata (=catalogue data) at archive.org is notoriously bad, for perfectly understandable reasons.  Many people have thought about this issue, obviously, but it would be a very expensive undertaking to catalogue even a part of what's there and even at a minimal cataloguing record level.  The Archive.org people take the "Google search" approach, i.e., you find what you need by searching using carefully-constructed keywords.  This is surprisingly effective, but lots falls through the cracks, as we all know from personal experience.

My personal approach has been twofold:

1. When I can, I add proper metadata in the "review" field.  And a permalink URL pointing to worldcat.org.
2. Specifically for manuscripts, when I can, I add a link from PanditProject.org and vice-versa.
   

What I do is purely opportunistic and just a drop in the ocean, but it helps me in the long run, and may help others.

Best,

Dominik

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