THE PERSPECTIVES OF CATALOGUING OF THE DUNHUANG COLLECTION
OF THE INSTITUTE OF ORIENTAL STUDIES (ST. PETERSBURG BRANCH)

L.N.Menshikov,  I.F.Popova
Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg Branch
Russian Academy of  sciences
St.Petersburg,, 191186, 
Dvortsovaya nab., 18, <popova@mail.convey.ru>

The most famous among the manuscript holdings in St. Petersburg are the Dunhuang  materials of  IV-XI centuries, which were acquired by academician S.F.Oldenburg (1863-1934) during his Russian Turkestan expedition  to China, Gansu province, in 1914-15. In accordance with the last definition the  number of the manuscripts of the collection is more than 18000 items. The work  on the systematisation of the Dunhuang materials  was begun by K.K.Flug (1893-1941) during the 1930-ties and was continued in 1957 by the research group headed by L.N.Menshikov. The main result of  the work became the published catalogue “Description of the Chinese manuscripts in the Dunhuang Collection at the Institute of the Peoples of Asia”, which was issued in 2 volumes in 1963 and 1967. 
The catalogue was organised into 2954 descriptive entries, with the corpus arranged into thematic sections. The manuscript catalogue data was provided with the extensive  information: 1) catalogue number and a collection reference; 2) title of the manuscript (the title reconstructed by the contents is mentioned in the square brackets); 3) the author; 4) published information (if existed) on the entry; 5) description and measurement; 6) colophone, date of the manuscript. This scheme is used now  for the compiling of  the 3rd  volume of the Dunhuang catalogue (paper book)  and the digital  description. Digitization and electronic cataloguing  make the contents of the manuscripts more accessible for the academics and are connected with the main aims of the Dunhuang studies in the world. In 1993 the British Library has launched the International Dunhuang Project interactive  web database. The first results of the IDP are now available on the Internet, the  scheme of description  represents the same manuscript and text-related information as the above mentioned “Description” of the St. Petersburg collection. At the same time the IDP’s database has an integrated catalogue, image bank and index, unifying search and query on the following parameters: 1) languages and scripts; 2) document form; 3) sites (provenience of the manuscript); 4) subject. The specific search is provided by the numbers of the manuscripts in the most important  catalogues (including the latest), published in China, Japan and Europe.
This searching scheme is now used  in the digitization program of the Dunhuang collection of  St. Petersburg. The work  is of a great scientific value, as creating  new technical opportunities for the preservation and  research  investigation of the written sources, and the new electronic information system promotes the study of the Dunhuang legacy in the world.