[INDOLOGY] 3-year position within the Qalamos cataloguing project at the Bavarian State Library

[Dominik Wujastyk]

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
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization> 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
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization>.   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
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