Institute digitises printed manuscripts of ancient scriptures

Updated on: Wednesday, November 09, 2011

The L D Institute of Indology here has developed a digital library of printed manuscripts of ancient scriptures in bid to preserve them and make them available to scholars and students studying them.

This library will be inaugurated by former president of India A P J Abdul Kalam on November 11.

Institute director Jitendra Shah said the digital library contains over five lakh pages of more than 2000 printed manuscripts which could be over 100 years old.

"The digitisation of the printed manuscripts has been done as part of phase one of a larger project where we would be digitising 50,000 rare books and over 75,000 handwritten manuscripts that are centuries old," Shah told mediapersons.

He said that in the first phase only the printed manuscripts, which were over 100 years old, have been digitised.

"The digitisation has been done to preserve the ancient heritage and making it available to scholars and students doing research on them, without compromising the safety of the original script," Shah said, adding the digitisation has been done as per international standards.

A catalogue of the digitised scripts would be kept on the institutes's website from where scholars and students could place a request for a copy which would be provided on payment of a token amount, he said.

"In the next 3-4 years, we plan to digitise the 75,000 handwritten manuscripts that we have," Shah said.

L D Institute of Indology was established in 1956 for the study and research of Indian culture, religious and social practices.

The Institute preserves the heritage of Indian culture that are in the form of Manuscripts.

It has about 75,000 Manuscripts written in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Maru-Gurjar, Apabhramsha, Old Hindi, Persian, besides Devanagari and Persian scripts.

These are written on many subjects like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Ethics of various Shastras, philosophy and rituals of various religions.

There are illustrated manuscripts also in which there are written passages with pictures. About 5000 such multi-coloured manuscripts have been digitized.

The e-library project, under which the institutes resources are being digitised is funded by the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Bharatiya Sanskriti Vidya Mandir Trust without any help from the government, Shah said.

Institute digitises printed manuscripts of ancient scriptures

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