PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—The Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts has been launched by Justin McDaniel of the University of Pennsylvania and Harald Hundius, David Wharton, and Bounleut Thammachak of the National Library of Laos. “This is a huge project to preserve, make accessible, catalogue and scan the entire corpus of Northern Thai manuscripts. Anyone from students and researchers to monks and nuns can now read this preserved literature of an entire people,” McDaniel said in a press release. The library contains approximately 5,000 ancient manuscripts from monastic temples, and will eventually contain more than 7,000. The database also includes material from the Preservation of Northern Thai Manuscripts Project of the Chiang Mai University Library. “It’s mostly Buddhist material, but also scientific material, historical material, botany, astrology, grammar, folk tales, philosophical tales, a massive corpus going back from 1410 to the 1950s when print became more popular,” McDaniel added. To read about an ancient site on the Thai-Cambodian border, go to "The Battle Over Preah Vihear."
