The project “Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (KOHD)” is a research project of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. It is funded in the context of the Academies’ Programme by the Joint Science Conference by means of the federal union and the federal states. The creation of a Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections was suggested in 1957 by German orientalists; it was founded by Wolfgang Voigt, the former director of the Oriental Department at the Westdeutsche Bibliothek at Marburg, in agreement with the German Orientalist Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) and financed until 1989 by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). In 1990, it became a research project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is to be continued until 2022. In 1996, the Union Académique Internationale, Bruxelles, placed the union catalogue as project C 53 under its patronage.
The project’s aim is to register manuscripts in Oriental scripts and languages which have not yet been catalogued, and to make them accessible through printed catalogues. Since 2016, the cataloguing data are mainly published in two databases, “KOHD Digital” and “KOHD Coptica”. Catalogues as well as studies dealing with specific manuscripts are being published in the publication series “Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland” (VOHD) by the Franz Steiner publishing company Stuttgart, edited by the project’s director on behalf of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Yearly reports on the project are published in the Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen.