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Rare Indian manuscripts now just a click away
WSN Network
New Delhi: Now, you can view rare Indian
manuscripts in the comfort of your house by a click of the mouse.
The National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) recently launched an
online database with information about almost 1.8 lakh rare
manuscripts. The database was launched by Union minister for tourism
and culture, Ambika Soni.
The website—www.namami.org — allows access to manuscripts that were
kept in approximately 30,000 public and private collections across
India including monasteries, university libraries, private homes,
madarsas, temples and bhandaras. The database will provide
information about various aspects of each manuscript such as title,
author, commentary, language, script, description etc.
Said an NMM official: ‘‘Apart from giving people full access to
these rare texts, we also wanted to do something to preserve
millions of neglected manuscripts.’’
The information available on the database has been collected by NMM
over the last four years by three primary means — large-scale and
labour intensive national survey and post-survey of manuscripts
conducted from state to state; documentation carried out by
established repositories and the database maintained by the Indira
Gandhi National Centre for Arts and the National Informatics Centre.
At present, NMM’s database has information about 10 lakh manuscripts
as filtering and authentication of remaining eight lakh manuscripts
is under way. The database is supported by a software named Manus
Granthavali, tailored by NMM specially for this purpose.
The minister for tourism and culture also proclaimed 45 manuscripts
from 21 different repositories across the country as ‘Manuscript
Treasures of India’. These unique manuscripts have been declared
treasures for rare content, some embody ancient Indian thoughts and
others which are endangered due to their vulnerability caused by
India’s natural climate.
14 March, 2007
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