Cambridge, United States
New Tibetan Studies Research Center
On 20 September 2000 the formation of the 'Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, inc.' (TBRC), a non-profit, educational service organization, was formally announced. The TBRC is a non-sectarian and non-political entity that is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
* By E. GENE SMITH
The Center's primary mission is to extend and enhance access to the Tibetan literary heritage so as to advance scholarship in Tibetan studies. With this major cultural materials initiative, the Center seeks to serve scholars of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, independent researchers, lineage holders, practitioners, and translators. The Center's activities in acquiring Tibetan publications from India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan have already made it one of the most comprehensive and diverse libraries of Tibetan texts in the world.
In fulfilling its mission to preserve and broaden the availability of Tibetan texts, the TBRC is developing a comprehensive bibliographic support and document delivery system for Tibetan material on the Internet. Any library or individual, worldwide, will have access to texts in much the same way as had they been at the Library of Congress or another great research library. In fact, this system will offer an even greater accessibility, as the user will not have to look through so many volumes of a collection to find a single text, because the TBRC bibliographic reference will be provided to a much deeper level of granularity.
The Center has begun to prepare scans of Tibetan texts as requested for scholarship, translation, or practice. Ultimately, Tibetan books will be made widely available as downloads from our web site, or on compact disk. Our first CD sampler containing twenty-seven bibliographic volumes representing almost 7,500 folios of traditional Tibetan text is available by e-mail on request (see address noted below). Preservation scanning will begin shortly, as many of the Tibetan books published in India from 1961 1971 are already rapidly disintegrating.
The prototype database with pilot search interface that is currently mounted on the TBRC web site will eventually serve as an on-line public access catalogue to the TBRC collection. Scholars should note that errors in data input have not been corrected for the prototype version. Some Tibetologists will have seen this database in its previous 'askSAM' manifestation or as the 'TibStud' programmed version of the Tibetan studies database, at the Trace Foundation, New York. To date, the test data is still limited largely to the teachers and works of the Gelukpa tradition. While the prototype does not yet display the reference sources from which the information is drawn, it may suffice to give some steering to colleagues.
Eventually, there will be a link to the Library of Congress bibliographic record through the call and card numbers and MARC cataloguing. A controlled subject thesaurus with tables of terms in Sanskrit, Tibetan, English, and occasionally Chinese will be installed. Other features planned for the system include: geographic coordinates of the monasteries and hermitage sites in which teachers were previously active, links from commentaries to the original texts, primary sources for all the database information, Unicode compliant Indic diacritics, and special facilities for Tibetan script in the database. The TBRC will be working closely with the Tibetan automation projects developing at the University of Virginia. It is our hope that we will have a seamless interface with David Germano's Samantabhadra and Tibetan encyclopaedia projects.
Funding for the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and its projects is anticipated to come from humanities foundation grants as well as grants from Buddhist foundations. Support for the formation of the TBRC has been made possible through grants from the Bodhi and the Vajrakilaya Foundations (whose web sites can be found below).
In conclusion, the TBRC is committed to providing integrated, open system research tools for Tibetan texts using international standards which can be used by individual scholars as well as other libraries worldwide, with the intention of advancing scholarship across all the disciplines and traditions in Tibetan Studies. *
For more information:
Http://www.tbrc.org: to download Tibetan books (electronic versions)
E-mail: info@tbrc.org: to request Tibetan texts and/or references not found through the research interface, make library appointments, and order copies of the CD sampler.
The Bodhi Foundation: Http://www.bodhi.org
The Vajrakilaya Foundation: Http://www.padmasambhava.org
Dr E. Gene Smith, a retired foreign service officer of the US Library of Congress and independent researcher on Tibet, is Executive Director of the Tibetan Buddhist Research Center. E-mail: gsmith@tbrc.org
TIBETOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES SERIES
This article on the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, written by Dr E. Gene Smith is the fourth contribution to a series devoted to important projects on cataloguing, 'computerization' (inputting and scanning), editing, and translation of important Tibetan language text-collections and archives. In this Tibetological Collections and Archives Series, various colleagues briefly present their initiatives to a larger public, or update the scholarly world on the progress of their already well-established projects. Some are high-profile projects, of which at least Tibetologists will generally be aware, yet some may also be less well known. Nevertheless, I trust that it will be useful to be informed or updated on all these initiatives and I also hope that the projects presented will profit from the exposure and the response that this coverage will engender. If you are interested in any of the projects described, feel free to contact the author of the article. In case you would like to introduce your own (planned) work in the field, please contact the editors of the IIAS Newsletter or the author of this introduction. We should very much like to encourage our contributors to keep us informed on the progress of their projects by way of regular updates.
The next contribution in this series will be by the TCAS editor on the Bon Virtual Library Project (erroneously announced for this issue in the IATS conference report of Newsletter 23).
HENK BLEZER
Research Fellow, IIAS
E-mail: blezer@let.leidenuniv.nl