Cultural HeritageTaking Stock: DREAMSEA Completes Its First Project Phase

25 April 2025

Photo: DREAMSEA

DREAMSEA, a large-scale project for the preservation and digitisation of Southeast Asian manuscripts, is about to embark on its next phase. A public event at the CSMC gave an overview of the initiative’s achievements and future prospects.

Today, a significant share of the rich written culture of Southeast Asia is preserved in manuscripts that are privately owned. Who possesses which holdings and where they are stored is often known only to insiders. Under these circumstances, it is a major challenge to preserve these cultural assets in the long term. Many of these treasures are in a physically precarious state because they are not stored properly. The humid climate in the region, political instability, as well as homogenising cultural policies contribute to the fact that important parts of Southeast Asia’s written cultural heritage are in danger of being lost forever.

DREAMSEA, an initiative launched in 2018, digitises privately owned Southeast Asian manuscript collections and contributes to their preservation. The members of the project, which is coordinated by the CSMC and the Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM) at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta and funded by the Arcadia Foundation, proceed in several carefully balanced steps that aim to optimally involve local communities.

First, they proactively approach the owners of collections that are eligible for digitisation, taking advantage of their personal networks in the local area that have been built up over many years. After a detailed inventory and obtaining all the relevant permits, the core work begins: trained photographers start digitising, supported by specialists from the scientific community who can read the texts to complete the metadata. Conservation measures such as cleaning and appropriate storage of the manuscripts are systematically integrated into this process. The final processing of the data is then carried out by experts in Jakarta and Hamburg before it is made publicly accessible in a database of the project partner HMML.

The first phase of this extensive undertaking will end in 2025. At an event held at the CSMC on 11 April, the participants looked back on what has been achieved so far: a total of 164 collections comprising 8,790 manuscripts have been digitised to date in the course of 56 field missions; this corresponds to almost 580,000 individual images. The researchers found 28 different scripts and 27 languages, including Arabic, Balinese, Burmese, Javanese, Jawi, and Khom. This diversity illustrates the cultural richness of the region and its writing culture.

At the same time, the event was about the future of the project. During the first phase, the team members identified numerous other collections that can be digitised. In particular, DREAMSEA will draw on the wealth of experience and extensive networks of local contacts – manuscripts owners and specialists – in the continuation of the project from 2025 to 2030. In addition, research collaborations on the digitised materials are envisioned, as well as networking of teams within Southeast Asia, to assure the sustainability of the project in the long term. The path the project has taken consists of an enormous number of many small steps, each of which involves considerable effort. The intention is to assure its continuation by highlighting local knowledge, and linking the numerous local initiatives to preserve the diverse written cultural heritage of this region.