Coordination of the project and editorship of the publication series VOHD:
Dr Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel
Orientabteilung
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Potsdamer Strasse 33
D-10785 Berlin
E-mail h-o.feistel@sbb.spk-berlin.de
Telephone + 49 - 30 - 266 - 24 15
Telefax + 49 - 30 - 264 59 55
Website
http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/kohd/index.html
The creation of a Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections was suggested in 1957 by German orientalists; it was founded by Wolfgang Voigt, the then director of the Oriental Department at the Westdeutsche Bibliothek at Marburg, under the auspices of the German Orientalist Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) and financed until 1989 by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). In 1990 it became a research project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and is due to continue until 2015. It has remained connected with the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which owns the largest collection of Oriental manuscripts and blockprints of any German library. In 1996,the Union Académique Internationale, Bruxelles, placed the union catalogue as project C 53 under its patronage.
The project's aim is to register manuscripts in Oriental scripts and languages, which have not yet been catalogued, and to make them accessible through printed catalogues.
Catalogues as well as studies dealing with specific manuscripts are being published in the publication series Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD) by the Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, edited by the project's director on behalf of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Yearly reports on the project are published in the Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen.
The current supervisors and the employees of the project are listed below; the contributions of numerous other scholars, past and present, are documented by the titles in the Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland.