Why preserve manuscripts?

[Guest guest]

Gentlefolk,

 

Since the dreadful incident at BORI, there have ben a number of

postings here to do with digitizing or microfilming efforts. They have

consisted, by and large, of two sorts of post: complaints that

preservation efforts have been thwarted - typically by Asian

institutions, or posts justifying the protective attitude of certain

institutions or individuals.

 

Takaoka Shucho, of the Buddhist Library of Japan, has been working for

some years on ways around this impasse. He and I have proposed a

different model for preserving texts, one designed to protect the

world's heritage against just exactly such a disaster as happened in

Pune or as very nearly happened at Mahendra Sanskrit University in

Nepal last year. In our model, there would be an archive, entrusted to

a respected central authority such as UNESCO, which consisted of

digital images of manuscripts. Access to this archive would _only_ be

possible if the original became lost or destroyed.

 

Under this model, the cultural capital would be protected, but the

institution which held the original would not lose its unique control

over access to the items which had been digitized. Takaoka has been in

consultation with the legal theorists at Creative Commons to try to

find a legal framework which would achieve these two ends; and it

seems, rather surprisingly, that some of the new legal instruments

created to protect the integrity of open source software can be adapted

to our ends with a very high degree of legal reliability.

 

Those of us who work in Nepal are all to aware that the present

political cauldron there is set to boil over at any minute, and no

number of rapid-reaction-force militia could ever rescue the countless

manuscripts which have not yet been digitized. The BORI incident makes

it clear that local outbreaks of civil disorder can have the same

catastrophic effect. There is, moreover, no guarantee that something

similar will never happen in the UK, or indeed any other Western

country with significant manuscript collections. Never is a _very_ long

time.

 

Perhaps it is time to put the short-term goal of widespread access to

one side, and focus on the crucial problem: we cannot afford to lose

any more texts.

 

I am more than happy to correspond with any librarians or scholars who

would be interested in helping build this `digital ark'.

 

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Dr. WB Tuladhar-Douglas +44 (0)7739 872 398

Wolfson College, Oxford will