Dear friends and colleagues:
I am pleased to announce the appearance on the web of a new site for learning and research on Sanskrit at sanskritlibrary.org located at Brown University. The Sanskrit Library is a digital Library dedicated to facilitating education and research in Sanskrit by providing access to digitized primary texts in Sanskrit and computerized research and study
tools to analyze and maximize the utility of digitized Sanskrit text. Scholars and students of Sanskrit are invited to use the website. Please pass along this announcement to all who might be interested.

The textual holdings of the Sanskrit Library currently include an independent-study reader of the Ramopakhyana, the story of Rama as told in the Mahabharata, Panini's Astadhyayi, and Purnabhadra's Pancatantra.
At present, the Library's tools consist of a display program for the reader with a versatile grammatical and word index. The reader display program presents the text in Devanagari, verse by verse, sutra by sutra, or sentence by sentence. It also provides Roman transliteration, analysis of sandhi, Sanskrit prose paraphrases, notes and an English translation along with a word by word grammatical analysis and lexicon. The web-based version of the Ramopakhyana, also available in print from Curzon Press, is an ideal tool for students of Sanskrit providing them with a fully analyzed text which they can study on their own or with an instructor. The Documentation on the site describes in detail the reader and index, and provides suggestions for use for both students and Sanskrit instructors.


The Pancatantra is available sentence by sentence (not analyzed word by word). The Astadhyayi is fully analyzed using paramaters relevant to more sophisticated research. It does not include English translation, substitutes anuvrtti for the Sanskrit prose paraphrase, and is indexed by a special set of tags. These tags do not provide the full variety of lexical information which the index provides for the Ramopakhyana but do provide lexical tagging of compounds, and tagging of
all anubandhas, pratyaharas, and other categories of significance to the Astadhyayi.


To access the Sanskrit Library click on the link below, click on "Registration for new users" and fill out the registration form. Once you arrive at the reading room page, click on "reader" under the heading "tools". Documentation with complete instructions for the operation of the reader and index is located at the right of the reading room page.
The holdings of the Sanskrit Library were developed with the assistance of Brown University, the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, the Das Educational Foundation, and the National Endowment for
the Humanities.

Sincerely,
Peter M. Scharf, Director
The Sanskrit Library

Peter M. Scharf, Senior Lecturer
Department of Classics
Brown University
PO Box 1856
Providence, RI 02912