American Committee for South Asian Manuscripts

1. Information about ACSAM's Manuscript Cataloguing Project

   The prototype of the ACSAM online manuscript catalogue is viewable now! With the collaboration of Brown's Scholarly Technology Group, ACSAM has designed and implemented an abridged draft version of its bio-bibliographical electronic cataloguing project, a Union Descriptive Catalogue of several thousand South and West Asian manuscripts now in North American collections. (The electronic catalogue design is an ongoing project, and we welcome comments and suggestions on its format.)

2. The Goals of ACSAM

   ACSAM was founded in 1995 under the auspices of the American Oriental Society to promote the preservation and use of manuscripts of South Asian origin in North American collections. We intend to achieve these goals in the following ways:
   
   

   • by identifying such manuscripts in public institutions and in private hands;
   • by cataloguing them though training and deploying Graduate Students to effect this task under the guidance and with the assistance of members of the Committee;
   • by encouraging the owners of the manuscripts to conserve those in need of attention;
   • and by making a digital version of the catalogue and digital images of every leaf of every manuscript possible, which will be freely available to scholars throughout the world via the World Wide Web.
   
   The full implementation of this project will take between fifteen and twenty years. Other such projects presently under way or planned in India and Europe will eventually make much of South Asia's rich heritage available to scholars everywhere.
   • Some sample digital images of Indic manuscript leaves

     Note: ACSAM regrets that due to space constraints on the University Web Server, the more detailed images linked to the above image list have been removed.

This page was last updated 9 September 2003.