February 11, 2020
Jakarta, DREAMSEA – At present, digitised pages of manuscripts from a variety of Southeast Asian cultures have been made available online. The public can read these digital manuscripts on the Open Access website https://dreamsea.co after clicking on REPOSITORY menu. The digitised manuscripts and the Open Access website have been made available by the program Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia (DREAMSEA). In this first stage, high resolution images of 593 manuscripts containing 20,129 pages have been made available along with the metadata. They originate from three different collections. The first part is the legacy of the […]
February 6, 2020
Many libraries in the world preserve Javanese pawukonmanuscripts containing divinatory calendars based on the Javanese 30 seven-day wukucycle. Collections are found in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta, the University of Indonesia in Depok, the royal palaces of Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Central Java, the Museum Sonobudoyo in Yogyakarta, Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, the British Library in London and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin in Germany, to name some of them. A number of pawukonmanuscripts are illustrated and form the topic of this contribution. Read More
February 6, 2020
Manuscripts are not only about content. The leather bindings, the kinds of paper, and the ink used may tell us stories without words – material talks. Dr. Dick van der Meij will introduce us to some Javanese manuscripts In 2015, the Leiden University Libraries received a very special gift from Prof. Merle Ricklefs, who donated seven Javanese manuscripts to the library (Cod.Or. 27.087 – 27.093). Prior to this donation he had already donated the extraordinary Serat Pustakaraja (D Or. 661) to the KITLV library, now part of the UB Leiden. These eight manuscripts form a most magnificent collection on Javanese […]
February 6, 2020
I Today’s guest blog, highlighting one of the most important Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakartawhich has just been digitised, is by Dr Dick van der Meij from Hamburg University’s DREAMSEAproject which digitises endangered manuscripts in Southeast Asia. Javanese texts are generally written in a non-rhyming poetic form called tembang macapat. Within each metre, verses consist of stanzas with a fixed number of lines, a fixed number of syllables per line, and a fixed vowel in the last syllable of each line. There are about 30 different metres, some of which are short and have only four lines per stanza, while others […]
February 6, 2020
In 1927, J.C.F. von Mühlen, the private secretary of Prince Hendrik, the husband of Queen Wilhelmina, donated a beautiful manuscript of the Dewa Ruci to their daughter, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, now preserved in the Royal Collections, The Hague. The manuscript was written in Yogyakarta, one of the four principalities in colonial central Java, in the Javanese year 1834, corresponding to AD 1904. According to the information given at the beginning of the manuscript, it was not made for Princess Juliana but rather for Crown-Prince Kangjeng Gusti Pangeran Adipati Anom Mengkunegara Sudibya (1879-1913), son of Hamengkubuwana VII, the Sultan […]
May 1, 2019
Magetan, DREAMSEA – DREAMSEA’s 11th mission was to Magetan, a city in East Java, Indonesia. Magetan is also called ‘City at the foot of the Mountain’ because it is located at the foot of Mount Lawu. There is an old mosque in Magetan which was built by one of Pangeran Diponegoro’s guards who had fled after the end of the Java War in 1830. It is easy to see that the mosque was made by an ex-soldier of the Java War because of the Sawo Kecik tree in front of the mosque. “This mosque was built around 1840 by one of […]
April 22, 2019
Sijunjung, DREAMSEA – During one month, from 22 March – 19 April 2019, eight members of the West Sumatra branch of the Nusantara Manuscript Association (Manassa) described and digitised manuscripts from the collection of Surau Simaung in Sijunjung, West Sumatra, Indonesia. They come from Andalas University, State Imam Bonjol Islamic University, and State Islamic Institute Batusangkar. Surau Simaung is a traditional Islamic educational institution located in Jorong Tapian Diaro Nagari, in Sijunjung Regency, Province of West Sumatra. Up to now, thousands of people have made the journey to the surauto visit the grave of its founder. In the surau, 88 […]
April 10, 2019
Digitisation is the best way to protect the contents of manuscripts. Through DREAMSEA, digitised manuscripts can be accessed for general, non-commercial, purposes. The manuscript owners are compensated, among others, by giving them disks with the digitised versions of their manuscripts. After they have been digitised, the manuscripts are returned to their owners to be stored by them. Another form of compensation is that efforts are made to preserve their manuscripts also in a physical way and to do this, DREAMSEA cooperates with the National Library of the Republic of Indonesia to make special boxes for the manuscript owners to store […]
April 10, 2019
Manuscripts diversity found in the house of Go Lan Ing in Makassar Makassar, DREAMSEA – “Digitising Manuscripts – Safeguarding Cultural Diversity” is DREAMSEA’s tagline for the main goal of our mission in Southeast Asia. In order to reach our goal we continue our mission in East Indonesia by preserving religious manuscripts. We expect to digitise more than 5000 manuscript pages. “Society is very enthusiast. We do not only offer to digitise manuscripts but also ways to store manuscripts better so that they are safe and will not become damaged. From our initial assessment we thought that we would digitise […]
March 20, 2019
Banyuwangi, DREAMSEA – Monday night (18/3). Ten people dressed in black shirts and batik wrap aroundswearing a head cloth (udheng) gathered in the building of the Osing adat community in Banyuwangi, East Java, Indonesia. They were around 60 to 70 years of age but also Ilham and Mala were among them who are students of the PGRI university in Banyuwangi who were only 18 and 25 years old. They are all members of the Mocoan Reboan and Mocoan Lontar Yusuf Milenial manuscript reading communities. The members of these communities had come together to welcome DREAMSEA who had come to Banyuwangi […]