Gauri Gupta came to Rare Book School from India in her quest to understand how to catalog, describe, and digitally represent manuscript fragments in accurate and accessible ways. Learn about her experience and how her work benefited from her time at RBS.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what drew you to RBS.
My name is Gauri Gupta, and I’m a senior at the Neerja Modi School in Jaipur, India. I was drawn to RBS for its rare ability to offer a space to nurture curiosity and a humanistic education rooted in historical sources, while encouraging experimentation with form and medium.
Coming from a city celebrated for its handmade paper and block printing traditions, I work at my school’s makerspace that functions as a collaborative hub for students and local artisans. One of our most meaningful projects documented the Sanganeri printing process through student-created books incorporating fabric samples, natural dye specimens, and QR-linked artisan videos. These books preserved a centuries-old craft while helping artisans integrate traditional techniques with modern design. As our makerspace began to grow, drawing both science and humanities studies, I found myself constantly looking for ways to refine our approach, to learn new techniques, explore better materials, and understand how other makerspaces operated and sustained. In that search for a community guided by the same spirit of inquiry, I discovered RBS and enrolled in the Building a BookLab course!
Simultaneously, I have been interning for the past two years with the National Mission for Manuscripts, where I’ve been learning preservation/conservation techniques while also designing a curriculum for high school outreach workshops! I was surrounded by people who had devoted their lives to the smallest details of manuscripts and I wanted to grasp as much as I possibly could. While the NMM has been incredibly open in allowing me to learn from their conservators and catalogers, naturally, access to certain resources comes with limits: institutions and scholars in India often have limited capacity to accommodate students who are still establishing themselves in the broader academic community.
RBS has been instrumental in providing an environment that was open enough to welcome, and rigorous enough to challenge. One that I am eternally grateful and lucky to have been introduced to. What I value most is how it constantly pushes you to think more deeply and work more precisely, yet does so in a way that feels encouraging rather than intimidating.
Why did you decide to take L-145: Medieval Manuscript Fragments: Cataloging & Discoverability, and what fragment did you propose to study?
I decided to take Lisa’s class because I want to understand how to catalog, describe, and digitally represent manuscript fragments in ways that are both accurate and accessible. Back home in India, there are hundreds of unrecorded and paper-cataloged manuscript folios scattered across temples, private collections, archives, homes, and libraries. Many are incomplete or damaged, and the absence of a structured metadata framework, such as IIIF, makes them almost invisible to scholars inside and outside the country.
The course focuses on fragment-centric metadata modeling and IIIF viewers, which directly connects to what I want to do. I’m especially interested in learning how to work with IIIF JSONs and manifests, and how handwritten text recognition can support digitization of South Asian manuscripts written in scripts like Śāradā or Grantha, which existing OCR systems rarely recognize.
The fragment I plan to study is a 15th-century Sanskrit folio from Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, currently preserved in Nagarshree, a small community archive in rural India. The manuscript is written on parchment, featuring faint red rulings and traces of black carbon ink, with sections of the text lost to insect damage and age-related decay. Its existing state makes it an ideal case for testing fragment description and discoverability techniques, particularly those introduced in Lisa’s class, such as IIIF-based metadata modeling and fragment visualization.
Beyond technical goals, I see this work as part of a larger responsibility. Scholars in India rarely have access to global fragment repositories, and collaboration with international platforms is limited. Harnessing and building on the skills I learned from Lisa’s course, I want to help bridge that gap – so that South Asian fragments can contribute to the global manuscript corpus, and so that collaboration defines our scholarship.
Tell us about your experience in the class.
I absolutely loved this course. It was one of the most engaging and intellectually rewarding learning experiences I’ve ever had. Lisa is an extraordinary teacher. Her clarity, generosity, and humor made even the most technical aspects of fragmentology feel accessible and exciting.
I especially loved the paleography sessions, where we studied Western fragments in detail. I loved being able to broaden my horizons and learn from and about new contexts and their paleographic conventions. Learning to identify scripts, abbreviations, marginal notations, and illuminations was incredibly exhilarating and I loved learning how a manuscript can be localized from the smallest detail. The “fragment speed-dating” exercise was one of my favorite parts of the week.
Visiting UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library was another highlight. Getting to examine the Rosenthal Fragment Collection up close and also seeing a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, was unforgettable.
Most importantly, the cohort at RBS was exceptional. Each participant brought a distinct background and the diversity of expertise created an atmosphere of genuine collaboration. This spirit of collaboration, of inquiry grounded in both precision and generosity, is what defines Rare Book School for me. It represents the best of humanistic study: a community of people united by curiosity and a shared belief in the value of learning together. I’m deeply grateful to have been part of it, and I’m genuinely excited to return in the future to continue learning, collaborating, and contributing to that tradition.
Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share about your experience?
I’m deeply grateful to RBS for extending such kindness and welcoming a high school student like me into its community. I look forward to returning to RBS in the summers to come, anyone who is even slightly curious about how knowledge takes physical form should definitely come to RBS!!! It’s an experience that stays with you.
Read more about Gauri’s work in her essay, “Bridging Archives: The Role of IIIF in Global Manuscript Preservation,” in The Times of India (8 October 2025).