State of art at today - Tuesday 30 May 2023, h.15:36:15

Functionality partially recovered upgarding to PHP 8.

Manuscripts archived 134

61 from collection of Haward Yengching Library; 68 from collection of Library of Congress; 5 from collection of INALCO (Paris)

Work in progress

CENSUS, a general catalogue and index of Dongba manuscripts

Welcome to CENSUS project page.

CENSUS is a project focused on making a general index of Dongba manuscripts spreaded around the whole world and its work is resumable by 3 keywords: access, discovery and convergence.

Access

Dongba manuscripts corpus consist in several thousands of texts, and according to Jackson among them about 5.118 manuscripts are fostered in some western institutions:

  • British Library in London
  • India Office Library in London
  • John Rylands Library in Manchester
  • Staatsbibliothek in Berlin
  • Library of Congress in Washington D. C.
  • Chinese-Japanese Library of Harvard-Yenching Institute in Boston, Massachusetts

Census aims to make these resources available, and their record retrievable from an unique instrument of research and investigation.

Discovery

From personal researches at today are also known other collection preserved in Paris (INALCO, Biblioteque Nationelle et Musee Guimet), and it seems plausible to hypotesize existence of other collections still unknown; CENSUS also aims to discover and catalogs such hidden resources.

Convergence

Each institution cataloged and classified manuscripts independently to the others' collections, thus CENSUS means to be a convergence project as in the making of a GENERAL CATALOG of Dongba manuscripts to CORRELATE and CONVERGE differents resources, making them available for scholars and researchers.

As web resource, CENSUS is linked and interrelated with an innovative pictographs' dictionary (CLAUDIA) and with digital edition of Dongba manuscripts (DOMENI).

For deeper information please, consult the dedicated pages, as introduction to CENSUS and its methodology for identification of CENSUS categories.