National Archives, Kathmandu

The National Archives, Kathmandu hosts the microfilm collections created by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP, 1970-2001). (The other host is the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, where copies are only issued to scholars of German nationality because of the Nepal-German contract terms.)

In 2003, the successor Nepal-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP, 2002-2014) published printed handlists of the index cards that were prepared during the filming process of the NGMPP:

• Preliminary List of Manuscripts, Blockprints and Historical Documents Microfilmed by the NGMPP, Part 1 (excluding Tibetan Material and Historical Documents) (Hamburg, 2003).
• Preliminary List of Manuscripts, Blockprints and Historical Documents Microfilmed by the NGMPP, Part 2: Tibetan Material (Release 1) (Hamburg, 2003).

Some more details of these volumes are given at the NGMCP website.

Subsequently, these short entries were converted into,

• two online short-title catalogues, one of Indic materials and one of Tibetan materials
• a descriptive catalogue of Indic manuscripts presented through a Wiki interface. This catalogue presented significantly enriched descriptive cataloguing metadata provided over the years of the NGMCP project.

These resources are available at the NGMCP search website.

A database based on the short-title catalogues is also hosted at the NAK. (Some diacritical marks are encoded in non-standard ways, making searching erratic.)

The NGMCP online catalogue gives so-called "Accession numbers" for the manuscripts, in the general format of 9/9999 (number, slash, number). However, personal inspection of the library by Madhusudan Rimal confirms that these numbers are also the way the MSS are arranged on the library shelves. So they are shelf numbers too.