Some of you would have already heard about the recent partnership between Malayalam Wikipedians & German University of Tubingen to digitize the works of Herman Gundert.

Dr. Hermann Gundert was a German missionary, scholar, and linguist, as well as the grandfather of German novelist and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. Gundert compiled a Malayalam grammar book, Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam (1859), the Malayalam-English dictionary (1872), and contributed to work on Bible translations into Malayalam. He worked primarily at Tellicherry on the Malabar coast, in Kerala, India. Gundert also contributed to the fields of history, geography and astronomy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Gundert

The corpus of nearly 80 manuscripts, 150 printed works and some palm leaf manuscripts of the German scholar available with the university runs into some 42,000 pages.