All About Indonesia

Until the twentieth century, many of Indonesia’s indigenous literatures existed only in oral tradition. In those languages that had developed writing systems, however, vast quantities of manuscripts were produced and preserved in private collections and court libraries. Scribes used perishable materials (paper, palm leaf, bark, bamboo), but it was common practice to recopy texts into new manuscripts if an old one was falling apart or an extra copy was needed. In this way indonesia’s written heritage was passed down, despite the impermanence of the materials it was written on.

Nowadays, however, the preservation of manucripts has become an enormous problem. Upkeep of a collection requires constant climate control, usually by means of air-conditioners and dehumidifiers, and many of the libraries that hold largecollections are finding them too expansive to maintain. The manuscipts are deteriorating rapidly in Indonesia’s tropical climate, and they are not replaced by new copies, as the practice of recopying has died out. More over, the contens of the manuscripts are increasingly remote from contemporary readers: the establishment of Indonesian as the lingua franca has led to a decline in the strength of regional languages, and the dominance of the roman alphabet in print has rendered the regional scripts in the manuscripts virtually unreadable by anyone but scholars. Centuries of literature and history are at risk.

It was against this background that the Ford Foundation decided in the mid-1980s to support work in preserving indonesian manuscripts, both through conservation of the actual manuscripts and through the production of microfilm copies. Ford modelled its grants on two earlier microfilming project: the Surakarta Manuscripts Project, undertaken by Nancy K. Florida in the early 1980s with funding from cornell University and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and work begun in 1984 to microfilm colonial-era indonesian newspapers at the National Library in Jakarta. The Foundation, sometimes in cooperation with other donors, eventually supported the filming of over 14,000 manuscripts in various court, university, and privat collections. Copies of the resultant films were deposited in the home collections, in the Indonesia National Library and Natioal Archieves, and in a research library abroad.