Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project
About the NGMCP
The Beginning of the NGMCP
The Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) is the successor of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (1970–2001). This NGMCP was launched in April 2002 with the approval of Government of Nepal and the University of Hamburg. After an examination by the Nepalese cabinet an Agreement of Cooperation between the National Archives of His Majesty’s Government of Nepal and the Asien-Afrika-Institut, Abteilung für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets concerning the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project was signed in Kathmandu on 16th August 2002. The NGMCP is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
Background
The idea of a descriptive catalogue of all the manuscripts microfilmed under the NGMPP from 1970 until 2001 existed at the time of the NGMPP. It was soon realized, however, that the microfilming of the manuscripts and simultaneous accurate cataloguing with the allocated time and resource would be an impossible task. For this reason, only index cards with basic information about the manuscripts were prepared during microfilming.
In order to secure immediate access to the information about the microfilmed manuscripts and enable the ordering of the microfilms containing them, a team in Hamburg started digitizing index cards in October 1987, still within the NGMPP. A title list of the texts belonging to the Indological section was begun with and it was completed in 2002.
Goals
This preliminary list was the starting point of the new project. The NGMCP aims primarily to prepare a descriptive catalogue of the Nepalese manuscripts microfilmed by the NGMPP.
Due to the fact that the collection contains an enormous number of items, it was decided for the time being to focus only on manuscripts written in Sanskrit, Newari, Nepali and other Indic languages, for, the immediate scholarly interest in Nepalese material concentrates on them. This leaves the Tibetan material and the historical documents. Nonetheless, even this limitation still leaves us with more than 114,500 items to be catalogued.
