Database of art

TENS of thousands of Buddhist manuscripts, paintings and other treasures scattered around the world have been brought together in probably the world’s largest computer database of its kind.The International Dunhuang Project, based at the British Library in London, is an ever-growing digital assemblage that makes it possible to study online around 160,000 images of 80,000 objects dug up in the deserts of Chinese central Asia and now in institutions across Europe, Asia and North America.More than a third of the artefacts are in British collections, having been taken — some would say plundered — by the Hungarian-born British explorer and archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein who travelled the Silk Road in the first decade of the 20th century.The IDP has centres in China, Russia, Japan and Germany as well as its London base, and early next year the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris will become a partner when its collection of 10,000 treasures goes online. This will make available the vast hoard of manuscripts discovered by Stein’s French contemporary Paul Pelliot in the Dunhuang Library Cave — this includes many secular texts, forming a basis for the development of economic, social and legal history of medieval China. There are also plans for the Institute of Korean Culture in Seoul to become a partner later in 2009.Each centre maintains images from their collections on their own servers. “Keeping their own images on their servers while having everything in one place on the web makes people less anxious about their own data. There are no issues with copyright, with digitisation centres in each institution having read-write access to other data on the database,” said the IDP’s director, Susan Whitfield, who has been with the project since it was founded in 1994 and oversaw its launch online in 1998.The Dunhuang cave complex on the edge of the Gobi desert is the most famous archaeological site in the region, from which Stein took a vast array of treasures including manuscripts in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan and even Judaeo-Persian, as well as in obscure central Asian languages such as Sogdian and Tocharian.But the IDP does not focus only on Dunhuang, and it includes artefacts from around 200 sites in the far west of China, where more treasures are being discovered all the time.Among the most remarkable items in IDP’s database is a coloured star-map in the British Library dating back to about AD 700, which the project’s website notes is “almost certainly the oldest extant manuscript star-chart from any civilisation”. The scroll can be viewed in great detail on the website, together with Stein’s original map of the Dunhuang caves.Whitfield said the project, which has about 10 staff in London and around 20 in the other centres, does not rely on outside technical consultants. All staff were expected to have a reasonable level of technical skills as well expertise in their own specialist subjects, ranging from early Chinese Buddhism to the history of paper making.“Technical skills are part of our remit,” said Whitfield, who has a doctorate in Tang dynasty historiography. “Outsourcing technical aspects leads to people not understanding what is going on ... It doesn’t work for projects like ours with a large technical element.”The IDP believes in making its technical standards transparent and uniform and local staff are trained so that quality and consistency of data and images are maintained.A Chinese version of the database was developed in 2001-02, and the database was redeveloped in 2005 involving the use of XML based on the TEI standard for the cataloguing and bibliographical data. These are stored in 4D and accessed using a 4D XML plug-in. Active 4D is used to serve the website and database.The website, which is in English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and German, has also been continually redesigned to include more functionality and data. It is now displayed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and current projects include plans to implement map layers for Google Earth.Photographing delicate manuscripts and textiles is a slow and painstaking process, but by 2015 the project aims to have catalogued, digitised and made freely available online 90 per cent of the Dunhuang collections. The IDP has a budget of around £350,000 a year, which Whitfield said is “fairly modest” given the size of the project.Whitfield said one of her chief aims was to get the National Museum of India on board. The museum in Delhi has around 11,000 items, mainly Buddhist paintings obtained by Stein, few of which have been published.The IDP has been in talks with the Indian authorities for the past 10 years, but has met with countless bureaucratic obstacles. “I am sure we will reach an agreement eventually,” she added.— The Guardian, LondonBy Michael Rank