Handwritten birs of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, janamsakhi manuscripts, hukamnamas, revenue papers, family genealogies, correspondence and account books survive in gurdwaras, deras and private houses across Punjab in unknown numbers.
Some have been catalogued. Punjabi University Patiala, Guru Nanak Dev University Amritsar, Panjab University Chandigarh and the Punjab State Archives hold collections. The Panjab Digital Library, working since 2003, has digitised millions of pages of manuscripts, newspapers and photographs, largely by taking equipment to where the material is.
Most of it is still uncatalogued. Manuscripts in a village gurdwara are usually stored respectfully and in conditions that will destroy them, in humidity, with insects, without any record that they exist.
Older birs are sometimes formally cremated when they become unusable, which is a devotional act and an irreversible one.
There is no state-wide register of manuscripts in Punjab. Making one is the single most useful documentation project available in the state and it would cost less than a road.
A bir is dated by its hand, its paper, its watermark if it has one, and by the colophon at the end if the scribe left one. Very few have been examined that way. What is generally known about a manuscript in a village gurdwara is what the granthi was told by the granthi before him.
They are lost to damp, to insects, to fire and to theft, and the theft market for Sikh manuscripts and paintings is real and has been for decades.
The market is why many holders will not say what they have. A gurdwara that announces a seventeenth century bir has announced it to everybody, and the losses have been steady enough that silence has become the ordinary policy, which defeats any register before it can start.