Palm Leaf Manuscripts

Tamil scholar and researcher U V Swaminatha Iyer worked tirelessly on bringing long-forgotten works of classical Tamil literature into the spotlight. He travelled the length and breadth of Tamil Nadu to collect around 3,000 palm-leaf manuscripts, publishing more than 90 books in his lifetime up until his death in 1942

Digitisation work of more than 30 lakh pages of palm leaf manuscripts

Government Oriental Manuscripts Library (GOML),GOML has manuscripts in 18 languages apart from Tamil, including Sinhalese. The process of digitisation began in 2012. The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) is the agency primarily responsible for the digitisation.

TVA- Tamil Virtual Academy. The academy used machine readable cataloguing (Marc21) software which is a universal software for marking manuscripts. “It makes the manuscripts more accessible to researchers around the world.” The Hindu religious and charitable endowments (HR and CE) department has recovered more than 60,000 palm leaf manuscripts from temples. The type of manuscripts referred to as ‘suru -nai olai’ deal exclusively with details pertaining to temples such as land records, gold wealth, donations, administration, and offerings. “It will take six months to completely digitise the inscriptions ,