Urduare

Urduare is a digital archive and scholarly platform devoted to the Urdu language and its literature. It functions as a repository for texts, transliterations, linguistic data, and scholarly annotations, with an emphasis on accessibility and long-term preservation.

The project began in 2014 as an international collaboration among universities, libraries, and research institutes across South Asia and Europe. It sought to address gaps in the digitization of Urdu manuscripts and to provide researchers with a unified, searchable resource.

Content and features include high-resolution digitizations of manuscripts and printed works, image-based access, optical character recognition for Nastaliq and related scripts, TEI-based metadata, transliteration tools, and user-contributed annotations. The platform also offers an open API and export options for researchers.

Access is open to scholars and educators, with licensing that favors non-commercial use. Governance is provided by an international consortium of partner institutions, with editorial boards, a moderation workflow for user submissions, and ongoing efforts to improve script recognition and metadata standards.

Impact and challenges: Urduare supports scholarly research, pedagogy, and preservation of fragile texts. It faces hurdles related to OCR accuracy for complex scripts, copyright constraints, funding sustainability, and ensuring inclusive representation of diverse Urdu-language communities.

See also Urdu literature, digital humanities, Nastaliq script.