THE MADRAS SANSKRIT COLLEGE AND SSV PATASALA
Website:
madrassanskritcollege.com
Job details:
Company Description
THE MADRAS SANSKRIT COLLEGE AND SSV PATASALA is a higher education institution located in Mylapore, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. With a strong focus on preserving and promoting the study of Sanskrit and traditional knowledge, the college serves as a beacon of cultural and educational significance. Situated on Royapettah High Road, it has been a hub for academic excellence and ancient Indian heritage. The institution is dedicated to supporting scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge through various specialized roles.
Position Overview
We are at the intersection of classical heritage and cutting-edge technology,
undertaking an ambitious initiative to digitize, preserve, and integrate traditional
knowledge systems into modern digital frameworks. The Manuscript Mission
Manager will spearhead a massive nationwide effort to locate, collect, and
digitize Sanskrit and related classical manuscripts.
This leadership role requires a unique blend of traditional manuscriptology
expertise and an appetite for digital innovation. You will build relationships
with major national libraries, lead a dedicated team of field staff and interns,
and collaborate directly with software engineers to develop advanced text-
conversion tools that will help build the foundation for next-generation
linguistic technologies and language models.
Key Responsibilities
1. Nationwide Manuscript Acquisition & Curation
• Strategic Sourcing: Develop and execute a comprehensive strategy to
identify, catalog, and collect Sanskrit and related Indic manuscripts from
libraries, private collections, and academic institutions across the country.
• Institutional Partnerships: Act as the primary liaison with chief
librarians, curators, and archivists at all major manuscript-holding
repositories to negotiate access, digitization rights, and collaborative
preservation efforts.
• Archival Management: Oversee the secure physical handling,
cataloging, and temporary storage of delicate source materials, ensuring
strict adherence to international conservation standards.
2. Digital Systems & Workflow Creation
• Conversion Pipelines: Design and implement robust, scalable systems
for converting physical manuscript data (palm leaf, birch bark, paper) into
highly accurate, machine-readable text.
• Quality Assurance: Establish rigorous proofreading and validation
protocols to ensure the integrity of the digitized corpus, preparing the data
for advanced academic and computational use.
• Throughput Optimization: Streamline the digitization lifecycle to
achieve rapid, high-volume text conversion without sacrificing scholarly
accuracy.
3. Technology & Software Collaboration
• Product Development: Partner closely with internal IT consultants and
software developers to design, train, and refine bespoke Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) software
tailored to classical scripts.
• Data Structuring: Ensure that the output text meets the specific
formatting and metadata requirements necessary for ingestion into large-
scale databases and AI-driven linguistic models.
• Feedback Loop: Act as the subject matter expert bridging the gap
between classical scholars and the engineering team, providing
continuous feedback to improve software accuracy and usability.
4. Team Leadership & Capacity Building
• Recruitment & Training: Hire, onboard, and continuously develop a
nationwide network of field staff, research assistants, and interns.
• Skill Development: Create comprehensive training modules for staff on
manuscript handling, basic paleography, digital capture techniques, and
text-entry protocols.
• Remote Management: Coordinate and monitor the daily operations of
field teams deployed to various libraries and institutional archives across
the country.
Qualifications & Skills
• Education: Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Sanskrit, Indology,
Manuscriptology, Digital Humanities, Library/Information Science, or a
closely related field.
• Language Proficiency: Expert-level reading and writing proficiency in
Sanskrit, with a strong grasp of various historical scripts (e.g., Grantha,
Sharada, Devanagari).
• Experience:o Minimum of 5+ years of experience working with historical
manuscripts or archival management.
o Proven track record in project management, specifically in scaling
operations or managing distributed teams.
o Previous experience collaborating with software developers, data
scientists, or IT teams on digitization projects is highly preferred.
• Technical Acumen: Strong understanding of digitization workflows,
metadata standards, and a conceptual grasp of how traditional texts
interact with modern computational systems and language modeling.
• Leadership: Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills,
capable of negotiating with institutional leaders and inspiring a younger
generation of interns and scholars.
Click on Apply to know more.