Union catalogues

A union catalogue is simply a master list: one searchable index built by merging the holdings of many separate libraries and monasteries, so a single manuscript can be found regardless of which building it happens to sit in. This page gathers the large, real-world catalogues of that kind -- among them the Hill Museum's microfilm archive, Ethiopia's manuscript census, the Nepal-German preservation project, and the Kanjur databases of Tibetan Buddhist canon. Each is a countable, searchable record of how many copies of what survive, and where.

Because a union catalogue counts real holdings rather than describing them impressionistically, it can settle questions that would otherwise stay a matter of scholarly hunch. Timur's fingerprint and The beta of the scriptoria both look for a measurable rhythm in scriptorium output -- a monastery's own manuscript-copying workshop -- a fingerprint of political disruption, a going rate of production, that only shows up once enough catalogued copies are counted together. Memoryless monasteries asks whether monastic copying really does slow down and speed up unpredictably, the way a "memoryless" process would, and The Sankore lag uses catalogue counts to test how quickly a change in trade routes reached a distant West African library.