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Highlights of 2024
Biannual mailing to all registered users of BUDA
Dear friends and library users,
In these final weeks of 2024, BDRC celebrates a year’s worth of dynamic work around the globe, as well as a quarter century of achievements. The renowned Tibetologist E. Gene Smith founded BDRC, then known as the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, 25 years ago in September 1999.
At 25, we are a mature organization actively fulfilling our mission to preserve Buddhist literature for the world, thanks to our generous donor community and a virtuous loop of productive partnerships that grow the archive and support technological advances.
This year BDRC archived and published an astonishing 3.5 million pages of Buddhist scriptures, far exceeding our normal rate of between 1 and 1.2 million pages. The newly released texts on BDRC include Kangyurs, commentaries, practice texts, and contemporary literature, much of it rare and not easily accessible elsewhere. This dramatic increase is made possible by collaboration with partners worldwide, technological innovation, and diligent cataloging work by our librarians over many years. Read on for some highlights and notable additions of the past year.
The BDRC archive now holds more than 77,000 volumes containing well over 31 million pages of Buddhist texts made freely accessible to the world. We see this growth in the archive paralleled by a rapidly expanding user base, with a 75% growth in online sessions over the past year.
BDRC's work extends around the globe, with staff visiting Nepal, India, Japan, Mongolia, and Thailand this year, as well as attending conferences and meetings around the USA. In April, I traveled to Taiwan with Chief Technical Officer Élie Roux to receive the Aming Tu prize on behalf of the BDRC team. The prize is awarded once every three years by the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts “for an outstanding creative contribution to digital Buddhist Studies.”
As you can see, at 25 we are better connected and more productive than ever, and knowing what a dynamic field this is, we take pride in our contributions — and in our community. If you have not yet done so, please support our 25th Anniversary Fund as we move forward to continue this important work.
A particularly notable achievement by the BDRC team is the development of a cutting-edge desktop application for optical character recognition (OCR) of Tibetan scripts. This long-awaited app, the first to accurately recognize major Tibetan handwritten scripts and text types, will be released for general use early in 2025.
Throughout 2024 the BDRC tech team has worked on a sophisticated upgrade to the BUDA UX and UI, which we will also launch early in 2025. This will simplify searching and browsing and make it easier for users to see the resources available and locate the texts they need. It will include an autocomplete function that will suggest the most popular results as a search query is typed, and major improvements to e-text browsing. Another breakthrough is the ability to search using approximate spellings and pronunciation, which our user tests showed makes it much easier to find what you're looking for. We can't wait to hear from you once you try the new interface!
Work with Local Partners in Tibet
BDRC is celebrating a decade of outstanding contributions to cultural sustainability, preservation, access, and education in Tibet. Over the past ten years, BDRC has digitized and made available millions of pages of Tibetan Buddhist texts through its online archive. This milestone achievement is a testament to the dedicated efforts of the project team and the invaluable support of local partners.
Digitization Projects
Work is 88% complete to digitize the incomparable collection of more than 11,000 TheravÄda palm-leaf manuscripts held by the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation in Thailand. BDRC also continues to work with the National Library of Mongolia and the Asian Legacy Library to digitize and publish the NLM collection of Tibetan and Mongolian texts. So far we have added 9,233 volumes since the inception of that project, containing over 3.1 million pages of texts.
Preparing to implement the TLMS at Geden Choeling Nunnery, India.
Capacity Building in India
BDRC played a pivotal role in a landscape assessment of text collections at monasteries and institutes in India, as the foundation of a project run by the Central Tibetan Administration to develop a Tibetan Digital Library. We worked with the CTA’s Social and Resource Development Fund (SARD) in partnership with the Sarnath International Nyingma Institute (SINI). We also supported Wadhwani AI in the development of a Tibetan Library Management System (TLMS), which will allow libraries to organize their collections and manage their lending systems in a convenient digital format. BDRC's Head Librarian, Karma Gongde, spent 3 months in India field-testing and training Tibetan monastics and scholars to use the app to catalog their collections.
Head Librarian Mr. Sonam Topgyal at the LTWA Manuscripts Division
LTWA Collaboration
A collaboration with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives resulted in the addition of several hundred volumes from their renowned Manuscripts Division. These are texts that had been gathered and cataloged by LTWA, and digitized to a high standard with grant funding from the Mellon Foundation. BDRC’s contribution was to add these texts to the BUDA archive to make them widely available to Buddhists and scholars worldwide. In 2024 the full collection of 420 volumes containing 216,444 images was published on BDRC's online library platform, and also shared with LTWA.
Rare texts from Dolpo, such as this unique and undocumented Gekar Nyinggyü (view here), with more coming early in 2024. Thanks to our partners at The Manuscript Project Vienna (TMPV) and their Resources for Kanjur and Tenjur Studies (rKTs.org) database.
A curated collection provided by scholars at Cambridge University from two projects: the Tibetan Book Evolution and Technology project (TiBET; 2013–2015) and the Transforming Tibetan and Buddhist Book Culture project (TTBBC; 2010–2016). Both feature 15th and 16th century block prints from the earliest Tibetan printeries in Southwestern Tibet, in particular, Mangyul Gungthang and Latö. View here.
25th Anniversary Celebrations
In September we marked BDRC’s quarter century with a sold out public event at the Rubin Museum of Art, with talks by Professor Donald S. Lopez and Leonard van der Kujip, an avant garde performance from Laurie Anderson and friends, and moving Buddhist readings by Michael Imperioli. This dynamic event was a celebration of BDRC’s quarter century of successful work and an opportunity to look ahead to the next 25 years.
For the past quarter century the Buddhist Digital Resource Center has been dedicated to seeking out, preserving, documenting, and disseminating Buddhist literature. As we celebrate our achievements we are also reflecting on some important questions: what is our roadmap for the future? What is our legacy? What is our promise to you, our users and supporters?
Looking ahead the mission remains constant. BDRC will continue to serve Buddhists and scholars by preserving and distributing texts, sharing knowledge and resources, and developing technologies to facilitate this work. I look forward to sharing more exciting news and updates with you for years to come!
Jann Ronis
Executive Director
P.S. If you use the BDRC archive, or wish to support others who benefit from it, please make an End of Year donation to our 25th Anniversary Fund. Your gift will support the long term sustainability of BDRC's mission.
