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Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts

The Project: General Information

The databases of the Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts are accessible since January 2019, see vertical navigation, “Databases”!

 

The Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections (Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland = KOHD) was a research project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony, financed by both the German federal government and the German states in the framework of a commission supporting education and research (Akademienprogramm der Gemeinsamen Wissenschaftskonferenz <GWK> von Bund und Ländern).

The creation of a Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections was suggested in 1957 by German orientalists; it was founded by Wolfgang Voigt, the then director of the Oriental Department at the Westdeutsche Bibliothek at Marburg, under the auspices of the German Orientalist Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) and financed until 1989 by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). In 1990 it became a research project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and was continued until the end of 2022.

The project's aim was to register manuscripts in Oriental scripts and languages which have not yet been catalogued, and to make them accessible through printed catalogues. Since 2016, most manuscripts were catalogued in data bases.

Catalogues as well as studies dealing with specific manuscripts were published in the publication series Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD) by the Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, edited by the project's director on behalf of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in Lower Saxony. Yearly reports on the project were published in the Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen.

The supervisors and employees of the last project phase 2016-2022 are listed under "Workgroups"; the contributions of numerous other scholars are documented by the titles in the Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland.