Alain Daniélou (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 04/10/1907 – Lonay, 27/01/1994) was a historian of religions, orientalist, a great expert on India and a scholar in the field of music. He left his archive to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in 1971. The materials are now held by the Foundation’s Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (IISMC), an institute Daniélou founded in 1969, in association with the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in Berlin (1963).

Devoted to Indian music, philosophy, arts and religions, the archive consists of over 300 manuscript copies of Sanskrit treatises on music, the transcriptions having been made by Daniélou and his collaborators to bring together the most important texts on Indian musicology from various libraries in India. The archive also contains around 300,000 catalogue entries concerning Indian music, philosophy and culture, with annotations, bibliographical references and drawings.

Most of the manuscript works can already be consulted in the IISMC digital archive.

A project for the automatic transcription of manuscript texts in Sanskrit, Hindi and English, currently underway, has been carried out by ARCHiVe researchers. Using Transkribus software and machine learning scripts, they train models for automatic text transcription. The aim is to make available to scholars the transcription of the sources, which will then be searchable in the digital archive, making them easier to read and study.

Previously transcribed and digitalised catalogue entries will function as hypertexts containing links to the sources cited.

The Fondazione Cini and the ARCHiVe Centre were among the first in the world to apply Transkribus automatic manuscript transcription software to Sanskrit and Hindi.

The scholarly coordination is managed by the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies.