MICROFILMING AND CATALOGUING INDONESIAN MANUSCRIPTS

The rich manuscript tradition of Southeast Asia is well known.
Indonesia, for example, is the proud inheritor of manuscript
traditions dating back centuries and representing a wide range
of languages and literatures. As handmade objects manuscripts
are by definition unique and each one has a value of its own.
Thus, if a manuscript is lost to the ravages of age or climate
or improper treatment, a unique manifestation of the culture
it stems from will have vanished, too. Such a loss is
particularly distressing in Southeast Asian societies such as
Indonesia where only a small fraction of the texts written
down in manuscripts have ever been edited or published in book
form. (Imagine, by analogy, that the sonnets of Shakespeare
were preserved in just a few paper manuscript copies!)
Given a tropical climate that makes storage of perishable
materials like paper or palm-leaf a daunting task, Indonesia's
manuscripts have not always fared well and their future
well-being is far from assured. This problem was recognized by
several scholars, mostly American, when they were conducting
research in Central Java. Recently two such scholars with some
experience dealing with issues of manuscript preservation in
Indonesia happened to be in Leiden and I managed to discuss
those issues with them. 

By Dick van der Meij

Dr. Timothy Behrend, currently a lecturer at the University of
Auckland, New Zealand, was a visiting lecturer at the
University of Leiden from October-November 1994.  Alan
Feinstein, formerly program officer for the Ford Foundation's
Southeast Asia Office in Jakarta, is from November 1994 to
September 1995 a Visiting Fellow of the KITLV and of the
University of Leiden where he is writing up research on
Javanese manuscript sources on Javanese music.

RECENT HISTORY 
One of the first persons to draw attention to the problem of
preserving manuscripts in collections in Indonesia was Dr.
Nancy Florida, currently assistant professor in the Department
of Asian Languages and Literatures, University of
Michigan--Ann Arbor. She conducted research in Solo in the
mid-1970s and, at the behest of officials of the library of
the Mangkunagaran palace there, she and her husband, Dr. John
Pemberton, in 1980 obtained a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and from Cornell University to
catalogue and microfilm the manuscripts of the Mangkunagaran
library. Florida carried out the bulk of the work of
cataloguing the large collection and Alan Feinstein (who
replaced the indisposed Pemberton) filmed the documents using
a portable microfilm camera. Seeing the value of the work
being done at the Mangkunagaran, officials of the other palace
in Solo, Kraton Surakarta, and of the Radyapustaka Museum
became interested in having their own collections filmed, as
well. Florida obtained additional funds, from Cornell
University and from the Ford Foundation, to carry out that
work and by 1984, all of the manuscripts in the three
collections had been catalogued and preserved on microfilm.
Copies of the films are held at the individual depository
libraries and at Cornell University; the original negatives
are held by the National Archives of Indonesia. Cornell
University's Southeast Asia Program in 1993 published the
first volume of a projected three-volume series written by
Florida, Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts, a
pioneering effort in the area of Javanese studies.
In 1984 Dr. Jennifer Lindsay was conducting research in the
libraries of the Kraton Yogyakarta for her dissertation from
the University of Sydney and found the state of the
manuscripts there to be extremely worrisome. Taking the Solo
manuscript project as her model, she proposed a project to
several libraries and funding institutions in Australia and to
the Ford Foundation's office in Indonesia. After funding was
secured, that project ran from 1985 to 1987, with Lindsay,
Feinstein, and R. M. Soetanto carrying out the work of
describing the manuscripts, and an Indonesian photographer
serving as microfilm photographer. Copies of the films are
held in libraries in Indonesia (at the Kraton, at the Museum
Sonobudoyo in Yogyakarta, at the National Library of
Indonesia), Australia (National Library of Australia and
University of Sydney Library), and the United States (Center
for Research Libraries, Chicago), while the original negatives
and copyrights are held by the National Archives of Indonesia.
Follow-up projects, which were funded mainly by the Ford
Foundation with additional contributions of film from the
Southeast Asia Microforms Project (SEAM), a consortium of
mostly American libraries specializing in Southeast Asia, were
then carried out at the Museum Sonobudoyo in Yogyakarta
(1987-1988), the library of the Faculty of Letters, University
of Indonesia (1989-1993), and, at the National Library of
Indonesia (1990-present). All three of those projects
emphasized the need to train and involve Indonesian scholars
and technicians as much as possible. Dr. Timothy Behrend
served as consultant to all three projects. Following
Behrend's departure for New Zealand, Dra. Titiek Pudjiastuti
is now finishing up the catalogue of the University of
Indonesia collection, and numerous staffpersons at the
National Library continue to work on making very brief
descriptions of the manuscripts (much briefer than those at
the Solo and Yogya collections, since the National Library
collection is so large) that are entered into a large
database; camera operators continue the painstaking work of
microfilming the thousands of manuscripts.
The evolving "Indonesianization" of these manuscript
preservation projects is noteworthy: for, though most of them
were initiated through the concern of scholars from abroad and
though funds to carry them out have come mainly from foreign
sources, Indonesian scholars and institutions have been
increasingly crucial in preservation efforts. Thus, Dr. Edi
Ekadjati of Padjadjaran University in Bandung completed in
1991 a two-year project to catalogue manuscripts in public and
private collections throughout the province of West Java. And
Dr. Mukhlis of Hasanuddin University in Ujung Pandang is
currently in the second year of a projected three-year project
to identify, describe and film manuscripts throughout the
provinces of South and Central Sulawesi. Those two projects
were also funded mainly by the Ford Foundation. The interest
of a string of program officers in charge of Ford's program in
education and culture--Terence Bigalke, Mary Zurbuchen, Alan
Feinstein, and the newly appointed Jennifer Lindsay--and the
commitment of Ford's financial support over the years cannot
be appreciated enough.
It is noteworthy, too, that the projects expanded beyond
Javanese-language materials in public or quasi-public
institutions. Ekadjati's and Mukhlis's work shows clearly that
thousands of Indonesian manuscripts are in private
hands--often as tiny collections inherited or used by single
owners. Some of these manuscripts are in an advanced state of
deterioration, but by capturing their contents on a durable
medium such as film, the life of the texts can thus be
prolonged indefinitely. A pilot project carried out in 1993
under the auspices of the National Library (and of which I
myself was a member) to uncover manuscripts in private
collections in Lombok has also borne this out: my colleagues
and I found hundreds of manuscripts in a very limited time
frame and geographical area. For indeed, in many parts of
Indonesia, such as Bali and Lombok, manuscripts are still very
much a part of daily life and ritual.

PROBLEMS
Behrend and Feinstein pointed out to me that many problems
were encountered in the efforts to preserve manuscripts in
Indonesia. In numerous cases, manuscripts in private hands or
in public collections had decayed beyond repair and could be
read and filmed only with the greatest of trouble. Using
portable microfilm equipment in often highly unsuitable field
conditions was also a problem. The Solo project required that
films be checked in the United States and numerous technical
problems and costly and time-consuming delays were all too
common. Learning from past experiences, though, the equipment
used and a scheme of checking and rechecking films in
Indonesian laboratories resulted in a far more efficient
operation and far more reliable products. The invaluable role
of the staff of the National Archives of Indonesia which
helped from early on in processing and evaluating project
films must be acknowledged, Feinstein points out. 

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS AND PLANS
One of the main benefits of the various manuscript cataloguing
and preservation projects carried out in recent years has been
the potential access they have opened up for scholars
worldwide to manuscripts in hitherto closed or unknown
collections. Both Behrend and Feinstein emphasized that it was
necessary to disseminate the information gathered so far
through the publication of indexed catalogues and computerized
databases. The later Ford Foundation-funded projects included
funds to subvene the publication of the first volumes of what
is seen as a union catalogue of manuscripts in Indonesian
collections, the so-called Katalog Induk Naskah-naskah
Nusantara. To date, volumes one and two have already appeared:
the first, covering the Javanese manuscripts of the Museum
Sonobudoyo and edited by T. E. Behrend, et al., was published
by Djambatan in 1990, and the second, describing the Javanese
manuscripts of two libraries of the Kraton Yogyakarta and
edited by Lindsay, Soetanto, and Feinstein, was published by
Obor in 1994. Obor has committed to publishing the future
volumes in the series: volume three, the Javanese manuscripts
of the Faculty of Letters, University of Indonesia, compiled
by T. E. Behrend and Titiek Pudjiastuti; volume four,
Sundanese and Javanese manuscripts in the province of West
Java, compiled by Edi Ekadjati; volume 5, Bugis and
Makassarese mansucripts, compiled by Mukhlis; Javanese and
Balinese manuscripts of the National Library of Indonesia,
compiled by Behrend, et al.; Malay manuscripts of the National
Library of Indonesia, compiled by J. Jusuf, et al. It is to be
hoped that collections in Lombok, Aceh, Madura, and other
parts of the archipelago whose manuscripts have as yet
received scant attention will also be included in similar
future projects.
Behrend mentioned the goal of developing a world-wide
comprehensive database of Indonesian manuscripts that had been
discussed during the Seventh International Workshop on
Indonesian Studies organized by the KITLV in Leiden from
December 14-18, 1992. At the meeting, an informal committee
was elected to consider standardizing formats for manuscript
descriptions. That committee (of which Behrend is a member)
has not put forward anything of substance yet, but Behrend
himself and his colleagues at the National Library of
Indonesia have already compiled and distributed a database of
some 22,000-plus items, which needs now to be added to and
refined.
I asked Feinstein about the future prospects of microfilming
as a preservation technique and specifically whether
digitalized storage--i.e., optically scanning an image into a
computer--is not the wave of the future. "Book conservators
are inherently conservative in their attitude to new
technologies, and, to my knowledge, microfilm is presently
still considered the only archival storage medium agreed upon
by librarians and conservators world-wide. But, yes, certainly
the day will come when standards for storage of and access to
digitized media are agreed upon and maybe at that point the
contents of all the microfilms of Indonesian manuscripts so
far produced could be transferred to the new digital media.
But, the results of recent pilot projects to scan Indonesian
manuscripts using ordinary scanners and microcomputers have
not proved particularly sucessful. In fact, there is some
concern that forcing books open on a flatbed scanner (much
like a photocopy machine) and exposing them to high levels of
light and heat for several minutes at a time per page may in
fact be doing unnecessary damage to the original items.
Preservation ethics dictate that any preservation technique
must avoid such unacceptable side-effects. So, for
preservation on microfilm should continue to be the rule for
some time to come."