Statistics

1,686 catalogues from 12 sources · 706 collections

Counted from the records at build time; a record in several sources counts once. Sources: About.

Goal: the largest open catalogue of catalogues

This site currently has 1,686 deduplicated series-level records, representing a conservative minimum of 2,151 volumes or parts. It is not yet proven to be the largest. The National Mission for Manuscripts reports that its CAT-CAT initiative compiled more than 2,500 printed manuscript catalogues. The figures are not directly comparable: one record here normally represents a whole series, which may contain many volumes, parts or fascicles. Instead of waiting for a closed checklist, we are reconstructing an open superset from public scans, catalogue sigla and library records; every merge and exclusion remains reproducible.Official NMM benchmark.

The lower bound expands only 126 records with an explicit numeric volume or part count. “Several volumes” and open-ended continuing series still count as one, so the real item total is higher.

Coverage against reference lists and databases

The units differ: bibliographies count catalogue entries, the NCC counts catalogue sigla, and manuscript databases count manuscript or film records. They are therefore reported separately, not added into one total.

Open scan inventory: DiCIM

A reproducible WebDAV inventory found 751 public PDFs in 225 folders without downloading the scans.591 PDFs sit in folders keyed to Biswas entries. Of the 157 PDFs outside Biswas, 131 are covered by explicit bibliographic merge or series decisions and 26 are documented non-catalogues. The outside-Biswas candidate queue is complete. The remaining 3 are archive-level documentation or scans of Biswas itself.Candidate files are not counted as new catalogues until duplicate scans, journal issues, articles and separate volumes have been distinguished.Browse DiCIM.

Source expansion queue

Priorities are updated when a source is imported, blocked or split into a more precise checklist.

Attested by how many sources

11 records have been checked against a title page or a library record; the rest repeat their sources as printed.

By source

Janert 1965 and Biswas 1998

Of the 379 records attested by Janert, 349 (92%) are also in Biswas. Of the 1,096 records attested by Biswas, 349 (32%) are also in Janert; of those Biswas records published by 1964, the year before Janert appeared, 321 of 519 (62%).

Janert lists 375 entries (with the addenda and the citations he could not verify); 369 of them are attached to a record here, 5 are left out because they are not catalogues of manuscripts and 1 is not yet decided.

Library catalogues

The Library of Congress and Open Library attest 775 records: 326 were already known from Biswas, Janert or research by hand, and 449 come from the libraries alone, 166 of them published after 1998.400 records have a HathiTrust link: 78 with a copy in full view, 322 that can only be searched.

Nepal

The Nepal research of 2026 attests 42 records: 27 were already known from another source, and 15 come from the research alone, 9 of them online databases. 32 catalogues describe collections in Nepal (see “By country of the collection”). Records the research could not confirm are not shown.

Texts (New Catalogus Catalogorum)

161,096 works from all 42 volumes, with 483,784 manuscript references (863,519 manuscripts counted from the item numbers).

The references cite 2,474 catalogue sigla; 397 (16%) are matched to 150 catalogues in this list (259 by hand, the rest through the NCC’s list of abbreviations of 1984), and these cover 73% of the references.Search the texts.

NGMPP films and the NGMCP Descriptive Catalogue

The NGMPP title list gives 117,272 records of films and the NGMCP Descriptive Catalogue 15,832 descriptions; 15,255 descriptions join a title-list record by reel number and 577 stand on their own, so 117,849 films in all, which are 106,625 manuscripts once the films of one accession number are counted once.

Of 40,106 distinct titles, 10,408 (26%) match a work of the NCC, so 63,411 films (54%) appear in the tables of 7,954 NCC works. The other titles make 28,690 works known from Nepal only (54,437 films), marked “NGMPP only, not in the NCC”.2,783 titles name more than one NCC work of the same name; their manuscripts go to the work with the most NCC manuscripts.

Electronic texts

The imported catalogues contain 1,370 electronic texts: 784 in GRETIL, 87 in SARIT and 499 in Muktabodha. Exact title matching places at least one readable e-text on 1,166 work pages (726 GRETIL matches, 112 SARIT matches and 424 Muktabodha matches).

A title match is a pointer, not an assertion that the electronic text is the same recension as every manuscript listed on the page.

The NCC list of catalogues

The NCC list of 1984 gives 400 abbreviations, each for a catalogue, list or hand-list the New Catalogus Catalogorum used; 396 (99%) are attached to a record here, 3 stand for no catalogue of manuscripts (a list of printed books, articles on Tibetan texts) and 1 is not yet decided.

The NCC list attests 387 records: 367 were already known from another source and 20 come from the list alone, most of them hand-lists that were never printed.

archive.org

Of 324 scans on archive.org whose titles matched no record, 88 are not catalogues of Indian manuscripts (editions, studies, sale catalogues, second scans, catalogues of Arabic and Persian manuscripts only); the rest give an online copy to 59 records we had and 17 records of their own.

By decade of publication

Biswas’s survey appeared in 1998 and Janert’s in 1965. 195 catalogues in the list were published after 1998.

By language of the manuscripts

A catalogue that describes manuscripts in several languages is counted under each.

By country of the collection

357 catalogues are not tied to a collection (union catalogues, registers, collections now dispersed); a catalogue of collections in several countries is counted under each.

Online copies

327 catalogues (19%) have a link to a copy that can be read online. HathiTrust links that only allow searching are not counted.