PREFERRED SCHOLARLY IDENTITY
Videha Digital Research Archive
Digital Humanities Research Environment for Mithila, Vajji & Anga
This is not merely a website associated with a set of books. It is a source-controlled digital research environment in which records are designed to be permanent, citable, machine-readable, versioned and independently discoverable.
What the archive contains
The environment connects regional history, genealogy and Panji research, literature, philosophical debate, texts and translations, people, places, chronology, maps, teaching material and research-practice tools across Mithila, Vajji and Anga in India and Nepal.
Scholarly infrastructure
- Stable permanent-record URLs for histories, ideas, people, places, texts and chronology.
- BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON citation downloads for permanent records.
- Schema.org JSON-LD, citation metadata, canonical URLs, sitemap discovery and machine-readable indexes.
- Versioned JSON, CSV, NDJSON and GeoJSON research releases with SHA-256 checksums.
- A fail-closed 293-record Videha ISBN authority registry derived from the editor-supplied ISBN.gov.in export.
- Evidence-status labels, editorial method, rights matrix, accessibility statement and source-controlled QA.
- Shareable research-state URLs, comparison tools, multilingual search support and offline/PWA infrastructure.
- Commit-pinned source-book objects from the dedicated Videha PDF repository, with Git object identifiers and machine-readable provenance.
Release 2026.09 publishes 780 permanent research records and a formal versioned data release. The archive is published by Videha Maithili eJournal, ISSN 2229-547X, and edited by Gajendra Thakur.
Relationship to the books
The books, manuscripts and translations remain foundational scholarly sources, but the archive is the wider research environment that connects those sources to structured records, evidence notes, citations, data, search, comparison and discovery. Repository PDFs are therefore treated as source objects inside the archive rather than as isolated downloads.
The principal PDF corpus is maintained in the dedicated public repository videha-ejournal/videha-ejournal. The Source PDF Library records the exact source-repository commit and Git blob ID for each indexed PDF and links to a commit-pinned copy. This means a later replacement on the source repository’s main branch does not silently alter the version cited by a particular archive build.
ISBN reconciliation is controlled separately by the Videha ISBN Authority Registry. The current authority contains 293 unique allotted ISBNs from the editor-supplied ISBN.gov.in export and overrides older staging or provisional ISBN lists for the edition represented by each portal record.
The source repository rebuilds its lightweight PDF catalogue after PDF changes, while this archive performs a daily refresh in addition to its normal deployment builds. Newly added or reduced PDFs therefore enter the archive catalogue automatically after they are pushed successfully.
How to cite and verify
Cite the most specific permanent record whenever possible. For computational or corpus-level work, cite the relevant versioned dataset release. Research-data release files use SHA-256 checksums. Externally stored source PDFs are identified by their exact source commit and Git blob ID; these Git identifiers are kept distinct from SHA-256 and are not mislabeled as cryptographic release checksums.