Today, there exists search engines that can lead the user to many required results in the field of study of any science. However, these works are not available in one place. The current database is a congregation of many important works of Indian Metallurgy and Alchemy in one place, which would grow organically as and when new data gets collected.
Many manuscripts on this subject still lie unexplored and some books published too are rare and are out of print. Digital copies of such things are also not available for students and scholars. Thus, they are collected. The database compiles the data under three main categories - Books, articles and manuscripts.
Search-ability within the database using various parameters like title of the work (title with diacritical marks and in Indian languages are also included), the author's name, type of work (original/commentary/sub-commentary/translation etc), language, script, broad subject (history of metallurgy , silver, gold and other metal-wise, alchemy, ancient Indian metallurgy, etc.) greatly enhances the utility of this database.
Some of the minor categories are captured using tags. Based on resource availability, image level tagging might be implemented for various works.
The above mentioned features make it very helpful for students and researchers on the subject. For the students, it can act like an online library of books/articles. For researchers, it would be a repository of existing literature as well as different copies/catalogue entries of unpublished manuscripts along with their sources, partly reducing the burden of hunting manuscripts in inaccessible places. Thus it could aid preparation of critical editions.
Many collections focus on either weaponry, therapeutic or other practical aspects of Rasayana Shastra alone. However, the present collection tries to include a wide variety of texts under all of these categories.
Apart from a comprehensive database with search ability, another important feature in this website / repository is workflow management for publishing unpublished manuscripts. Several roles have been implemented apart from the administrator who first pushes an unpublished but complete manuscript to a common pool. A person in the role of a scholar can transcribe it in any script. Others who work as part of the flow can include a Verifier, publisher, translator and a digitizer. Each of them can be assigned specific access by the administrator who is able to monitor the dashboard containing the number of works in each category and the stage in which a particular text is being processed at that moment. Each manuscript can be translated into multiple languages and can be exported as a pdf or rich text format.
The above described feature enables a virtual team to work through a flow to get a manuscript published. This is a very important feature in this age since experts are unable to gather in a single location very frequently.
There is a 'report' feature which can give a status report or detailed report on a particular selection of texts through filters. For example, Selecting detailed report for books in Alchemy (subject category) will display the details of all the important fields for this particular set of books.
This tool's framework can be extended to accommodate various other shastras.