page_title: International Dunhuang Project
section_title: Activities
hierarchical_section_title: International Dunhuang Project / Activities
caption_attribution_description: English: Digitisation of a Dunhuang manuscript (the Rabbit Garden Imperial Book Repository 兔園策府) in the IDP UK studio.
context_page_description: The International Dunhuang Project is an international collaborative effort to conserve, catalogue and digitise manuscripts, printed texts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from the Mogoa caves at the Western Chinese city of Dunhuang and various other archaeological sites at the eastern end of the Silk Road. The project was established by the British Library in 1994, and now includes twenty-two institutions in twelve countries. As of 1 March 2016 the online IDP database comprised 137,812 catalogue entries and 483,721 images. Most of the manuscripts in the IDP database are texts written in Chinese, but more than fifteen different scripts and languages are represented, including Brahmi, Kharosthi, Khotanese, Sanskrit, Tangut, Tibetan, Tocharian and Old Uyghur.
  Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, has noted that there are many advantages of the IDP providing high resolution digital images of Dunhuang manuscripts online for access to all.
context_section_description: The main activities of the IDP are the conserving, cataloguing, and digitising of manuscripts, woodblock prints, paintings, photographs and other artefacts in the collections material from Dunhuang and other Eastern Silk Road sites held by participating institutions.  Digitised images of the items in the IDP database are made available to the public on the IDP website.  The digital images are intended to be at least as legible as the original manuscripts, and allow scholars to access the material from anywhere in the world without causing any more damage to the fragile items themselves.
  The central core of the project is the online database of catalogue records and images.  This is intended to serve three main purposes:
  to act as a replacement for tools previously used by institutions to manage their collections;
  to act as a replacement for the offline catalogues previously used by scholars to access the collections;
  to provide additional functionality that will make the database an important scholarly tool.
  In 2002, Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive Officer of the British Library, put forward the International Dunhuang Project as a good example of the sort of complex, collaborative, and international digitisation projects that the British Library was increasingly engaged in.  She explained that none of the individual institutions participating in the project had the resources or facilities to allow scholars full access to all of the manuscripts in their collections, but by joining together and sharing knowledge and resources the institutions would be able to offer access to the combined collections of all the institutions by means of high-quality digital images.  She noted that a digitisation project such as the IDP benefits both the institutions involved, who are often able to obtain more substantial funding than they would for an internal project, and also the scholarly community, who are given access through the digital images to fragile and often inaccessible items that might previously have been difficult or impossible to view.
caption: Digitisation at the British Library of the Rabbit Garden Imperial Book Repository 兔園策府, a Tang dynasty manuscript from Dunhuang
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