Heidelberg University Library, Germany
The Heidelberg University Library, founded in the 1300s in Heidelberg, a town in southwestern Germany, has a collection of over three million books.
Its director is Dr. Veit Probst, a German philologist, historian, and librarian.
Dr. Probst studied classical philology, philosophy and history at the Universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim as well as at the German Historical Institute in Rome. He received a doctorate summa cum laude with a thesis in history at the University of Mannheim.
After completing his library traineeship, Dr. Probst joined the Heidelberg University Library in 1990 to research the Palatina manuscripts.
The Bibliotheca Palatina (Palatinate library) of Heidelberg was the most important library of the German Renaissance, numbering about five thousand printed books and over three thousand manuscripts.
Soon afterwards Dr. Probst took on specialist librarianship tasks and was given a managerial role in the acquisitions department of the university library. Since 2002 he has been the director of the university library.
Under his leadership, the Heidelberg library system has been fundamentally redesigned in terms of buildings, organizational structures, digitization and tasks.
Numerous library buildings were renovated and rebuilt, and the number of library locations was consolidated from 104 to 39.
Organizational structures were adapted by establishing several large departmental libraries, including the Bergheim campus library for economics and social sciences, the Mathematikon, a library serving the mathematics and computer science department, and the library of the Center for Asian Studies and Transcultural Studies. A large medical and scientific branch of the university library also opened in 2021.
Dr. Probst launched the construction of a digitization center to record historical holdings, and initiated and managed, among other things, virtual consolidation of the nearly 3,600 manuscripts of the Bibliotheca Palatina (2001-2021) distributed among the Heidelberg University Library and the Vatican Library in Rome.
In this international collaboration, the German-language manuscripts in Heidelberg and the Latin, Greek and Oriental manuscripts in the Vatican Library were digitized. In addition to indexing old historical holdings, specialist information services for art history, ancient studies and the South Asia region were included in the Heidelberg University Library digitization program.
Under his leadership, the library’s tasks expanded from providing to producing information. Among innovations in the digital humanities was the founding of Heidelberg University Publishing, an Open Access online press.
Among books available to Thammasat University students for free download include a volume which may be useful to researchers interested in Asian legal history.
The Mulukī Ain of 1854: Nepal’s First Legal Code is about
a law code with constitutional features drafted at the initiative of Prime Minister Jaṅga Bahādura Rāṇā—is the foundational legal text for modern Nepal. It covers almost every aspect of public, criminal, private and religious law, ranging from the organisation of the state and courts to murder and other delicts, the workings of the caste system and the joint family, matters of purity and penance, customary law, widow-burning and witchcraft. As such, the Mulukī Ain is a unique source not only for the political, social and economic life of 19th-century Nepal, but also for the place of traditional Hindu jurisprudence in South Asian legal cultures.
It was introduced, translated and annotated by Rajan Khatiwoda, chief coordinator at the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project at Heidelberg University; Simon Cubelic, research fellow at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities; and Axel Michaels, Senior Professor of Indology at Heidelberg University. Their research focuses on the intellectual history of legal and political thought in Sanskrit and Nepālī, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This legal code offers many specific sanctions for offenses in conduct, for example:
- If someone cuts a man’s beard, moustache or hair without permission, he shall be fined 5 rupees.
- If someone cuts an unmarried or married woman’s or a widow’s hair without the right to do so, he shall be fined 40 rupees…
- If a person catches somebody’s hair and pulls it out, he—irrespective of whether it has happened [only] between men, [only] between women or between women and men—shall be fined 5 rupees. If a man catches the hair of another man’s wife and pulls it out, he shall be fined 10 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall, in accordance with the Ain, be imprisoned.
- If someone grabs a person by his neck or drags him forcibly without any right to do so, he shall be fined 3 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall, in accordance with the Ain, be imprisoned…
- If a person slaps another person’s cheek around 1–2 times, and if the latter comes to complain that [the former] has slapped the latter’s cheek, and if it is confirmed upon investigation, the one who has slapped [the victim’s] cheek shall be fined 4 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall, in accordance with the Ain, be imprisoned…
- If someone has kicked another person and that person comes to complain that he was kicked [by him], the one who kicked him shall be fined 15 rupees. If two persons kick each other, the one who kicks first shall be fined 6 rupees, the one who kicks back shall be fined 3 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, they shall, in accordance with the Ain, be imprisoned. If someone comes to complain that, during a quarrel, a person beat him with a shoe or kicked him wearing shoes, the person who beat [the victim] with a shoe or who kicked him wearing shoes shall be fined 20 rupees. If two persons beat each other with shoes or kick each other wearing shoes, the person who hit first shall be fined 10 rupees and the one who hit back shall be fined 5 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, they shall, in accordance with the Ain, be imprisoned…
- If someone grabs someone else by his hair and also pins him to the ground, such [an offender] shall be fined 7 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall be imprisoned.
- If someone grabs someone else by his hair, slaps him and also pins him to the ground, such [an offender] shall be fined 20 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall be imprisoned.
- If someone grabs someone else by his hair, slaps him, pins him to the ground and kicks him, such [an offender] shall be fined 30 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall be imprisoned.
- If someone grabs someone else by his hair, slaps him, pins him to the ground, kicks him and hits him with his shoes, such [an offender] shall be fined 40 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall be imprisoned.
- If someone grabs someone else by his hair, slaps him, pins him to the ground, kicks him, hits him with his shoes and also with a stick, such [an offender] shall be fined 50 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall be imprisoned.
- If someone grabs someone else by his hair, slaps him, pins him to the ground, kicks him, hits him with his shoes and a stick and also attacks him with nettles, such [an offender] shall be fined 60 rupees. If the amount of the fine is not paid, he shall be imprisoned.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)