This is going to be one of the biggest Jain projects ever to happen in the UK and it follows on from the Jain Art from India – The Peaceful Liberators exhibition at the V&A in 1995, which many people in the Jain community still remember.

Alongside the development of the website, there is going to be a three-year programme of outreach work with the community.

This will include major exhibitions at the partner / holding institutes. In 2010 there will be a year-long exhibition at the V&A, followed by an exhibition at the British Library from May to June 2011 and then one at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2012. To complement the major exhibitions there will be smaller exhibitions travelling around the country to venues such as art centres and multi-faith centres, along with associated workshops and activities.

There will be an extensive national education programme – we will be delivering INSET (In-School Education and Training) sessions to teachers in line with guidelines for the National Curriculum with the possibility of giving additional workshops in school sessions. The Institute of Jainology has already been working for some time towards getting Jainism taught in schools through the ‘Discover Jainism’ books and providing teachers’ notes in line with QCA notes for religious education for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3.

How can you get involved?

In total, we are hoping to reach over 400,000 people nationwide over the next two to three years. To deliver the various activities planned over the next few years we need an active, committed team of volunteers with a variety of skills such as:

• workshop leaders and assistants to deliver sessions in schools and museums
• trainers of teachers at Key Stage 3 level (ages 11 to 14)
• advocates and ambassadors who will go out into the community and spread the word about Jainism and JAINpedia
• researchers to source and evaluate web content, e.g. articles, essays, photos, videos, to populate the website
• writing for the magazine Jain Spirit, which we are hoping to relaunch as part of the website development.

We need a minimum commitment of six months and in return for this you will receive:

• training from experts
• full support and expenses
• development of your skills base
• the feeling of being part of a great team
• the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of a unique national project.

Our parents and grandparents ensured that we have grown up knowing about Jainism and benefiting from its values and teachings. We need to make sure that our children also benefit from this beautiful religion.

To find out more and/or to register your interest in volunteering contact usha.shah@jainpedia.org

The IoJ spent some 12 years in cataloguing the collection of Jain manuscripts in the British Library – a testament to the dedication of the scholars who worked on this task. The collection has many beautifully illustrated folios on paper, cloth and palm leaf and covers a diverse range of subjects related to Jain beliefs, tradition and practices. This makes it not only of importance to the Jain community, but also because it is a part of Britain’s imperial history and a constituent of modern, multicultural Britishness.

Producing the catalogue was a milestone in IoJ’s history, and its launch by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace was the icing on the cake. Although the catalogue brought much wider awareness of the collection, especially its newer acquisitions, it had already become apparent that the collection was not being fully utilised except by a few scholars and learned monks and nuns.

The challenge was a simple one: how do we make this collection accessible to a wide and diverse audience? This question of access was also a multi-faceted one – physical contact with these manuscripts can be difficult as some are rare, many centuries old and fragile; even if one could get to them, many are in languages that have not been spoken for a millennia and more; and, if one could perchance read the script, the contents are themselves difficult without an understanding of Jain philosophy, history and culture!

Out of this challenge came the seed of Jainpedia: a rich online resource that would have at its heart a digitised collection of some 5,000 folios from the Jain collections at the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bodleian Library and the Wellcome Trust Collection. The digitised images would be contextualised with commentaries from modern scholars, audio and video material and translations of the original texts. Alongside this there would be material for schools and young people, as well as somewhere for the Jain community to record their views and practices in the 21st century.

This resource would then be launched in the community through major exhibitions at the V&A and the British Library, activities in schools and events at other regional religious and heritage centres and at Jain temples.

I am excited by both the scale and opportunity that Jainpedia brings. I am grateful to the stakeholders, funders and the Jainpedia team for making this project a reality and I eagerly look forward to its launch in the coming months.

Mehool Sanghrajka
Project Director – Jainpedia
Director, Institute of Jainology