Please convey my apologies to Dr Rauch for jumping to conclusions from the job advertisement.  I wish the project every success.  I hope Qalamos and MyCoRe give a relational approach to data capture and storage.  Once one gets beyond cataloguing a few hundred Indian manuscripts, it becomes exponentially harder to keep the data consistent and coherent unless each data point is stored in one place only, i.e., in a normalised relational database. 

It is good to learn that MyCoRe makes data publicly available.  One prominent application of MyCoRe mentioned in the Wikipedia page is the "The International Treasury of Islamic Manuscripts", but I am unable to find a working website for that project.  If anyone has a working link, please share

And may I add that *any* cataloguing of Indic manuscripts is highly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Dominik Wujastyk



On Tue, 4 Jul 2023 at 18:21, Roland Steiner via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

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 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.
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 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@sbb.spk-berlin.de
http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
https://www.qalamos.net 
https://od-portal.hypotheses.org/
 

* * *

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

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 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.   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@list.indology.info> -----


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