A Text-Based Approach to Electronic Cataloguing of Non-Western Manuscripts

A Text-Based Approach to Electronic Cataloguing of
Non-Western Manuscripts

Kim
Plofker
History of Mathematics/Scholarly Technology Group Brown University
Kim_Plofker@Brown.edu

David
Pingree
History of Mathematics/Scholarly Technology Group Brown University

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The importance of the descriptive catalogue of manuscripts as a bibliographic
tool is currently being reaffirmed by the interest shown by various institutions
in creating such catalogues on-line. The advantages of an electronic format for
such a tool--accessibility, searchability, ease of revision and expansion--are
too widely recognized to need explication here. Instead, this paper concentrates
on some of the difficulties involved in the attempt to exploit these advantages
without sacrificing the usefulness of the mature traditional printed format,
particularly in the case of non-Western texts; and on the solutions employed in
designing one such project, an electronic descriptive catalogue of some 5000
manuscripts from South and West Asia.
The task of descriptive cataloguing itself, irrespective of the format of the
finished product, exhibits a new set of problems to those cataloguers who
venture outside the European textual tradition. In the first place, the greater
chronological extent of the chirographic tradition in most of Asia, as compared
to that in most of Europe (where scribal copying of texts began later and was
sooner replaced by printing) means that there are simply more manuscripts from
the non-Western world, by some orders of magnitude. Related to this is the
comparative lack of bibliographic control for non-Western manuscripts, where the
relation among author, text, and manuscript is generally much more obscure than
for European ones. Thus any catalogue of such manuscripts must undertake to be
also a catalogue of the texts themselves, rather than merely concentrating on
the physical characteristics of manuscript instances of known works.
The same uncertainty permeates almost all other aspects of Asian manuscriptology.
Even the subject classifications of known works are not firmly established in
all their divisions: although a sufficiently minute classification scheme may
exist in the work's indigenous tradition, such schemes are in many cases not yet
usefully integrated into Western bibliography. The features of the physical
manuscripts are no more tractable than those of their more abstract contents.
Since it is neither feasible nor sensible to refrain from cataloguing
non-Western manuscripts until all these varied issues of bibliographic and
codicological control have been resolved (and indeed, in all probability it is
only the knowledge gained through cataloguing attempts that will make it
possible to resolve them), the author of such a catalogue must for the present
rest satisfied with ensuring that its structure and presentation convey as much
information as possible, without giving misleading impressions of certainty
where none exists.
The foregoing brief and simplified description of some challenges peculiar
(either in kind or in degree) to making a catalogue of non-Western manuscripts
should serve to make it apparent that the electronic finding aid, implemented as
or at least based upon a fielded database, is not in all respects the ideal
model for producing such a catalogue in electronic form. The searchable fielded
database works best with data that conforms well to a highly organized and
unambiguous structure, and that can easily be segmented and then reconstructed
in an automated process. The varying confidence levels of the information
comprised by a catalogue of non-Western manuscripts are not as well suited to
this format. Finally, a descriptive catalogue in electronic form should have a
structure that is easily converted to that of a conventional printed catalogue,
with the standard textual finding aids that electronic search capabilities
attempt to mimic and extend.
These are the considerations that shaped the design of the bio-bibliographical
electronic cataloguing project described in this paper, a project now being
developed by the American Committee for South Asian Manuscripts (ACSAM). ACSAM
will publish over the next few years an on-line version of a Union Descriptive
Catalogue containing detailed information about thousands of South and West
Asian manuscripts in North America and the texts contained in them. The
prototype of the Union Descriptive Catalogue reflects some approaches differing
from the design of most traditional electronic finding aids; they were adopted
to lessen the tensions described above between the binary logic of computer
operations and the ambiguity inherent in describing works and manuscripts
outside the European tradition. The chief of these approaches is the abandonment
of a fielded database structure in favor of SGML.
The catalogue's user interface also requires some deviations from that of a more
straightforward electronic finding aid, in order to accomodate the unusual
nature of the data. Although non-roman scripts will all be represented in roman
transliteration, the transliterated characters must include a complete set of
diacritical marks in order to provide unambiguous standard scholarly character
equivalents for each script. At the same time, the screen representation of
these characters must be as little dependent as possible on the advanced
capabilities of current hardware and software, since many users will not have
access to the latest technology or anything near it. Finally, the search engine
will have a customized query manager to augment its existing capabilities of
searching for free text and/or by element or attribute type, or structural
characteristic. The query manager will employ various "fuzzy matching"
techniques to optimize the usefulness of searches whose typical ambiguities will
include variant forms or vocalizations of names, comparisons of precise dates or
chronological ranges with vague or unknown ones, identification of well-known
texts by the European version(s) of their titles, and so forth. The goal of the
design as a whole is to use as much as possible of the power of computing
capabilities while simultaneously doing no violence to the somewhat amorphous
structure of the data.