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Executive Director Jann Ronis and Chief Technical Officer Élie Roux traveled to Taiwan 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.”
Dear BUDA User,
This is the first of our bi-annual mailings of 2024 to all registered users of BUDA, the online archive of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (formerly Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center). As you are a registered user, we want to keep in touch and let you know about key updates to the library site.
This year will mark 25 years since our founder E. Gene Smith established the organization and began digitizing Tibetan texts in 1999. We will roll out several major innovations to the library platform over the course of this silver anniversary year.
Firstly, two exciting recent developments are making it possible to add material to the archive faster than ever before. Innovations in computer vision technologies (Optical Character Recognition or OCR) enable the accurate recognition and extraction of Tibetan script embedded in scans. This streamlines the process of creating searchable e-texts of scans, which users of the database can query and download. Also, BDRC’s CTO Élie Roux has developed a tool that uses AI to crop away unwanted backgrounds and margins from photographs of manuscripts. This has dramatically speeded up the post scanning workflow of image clean-up and archiving, meaning acquired texts are available to view much sooner than was previously possible.
As a result of these innovations, significant amounts of important new content will be coming online this year, including:
3,500 manuscript texts from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.
The Kangyur from the Shey Palace in Tibet, scanned by the Tibetan Manuscript Project Vienna (TMPV) from manuscripts held at the British Library.
New collections from TMPV; the Lang and Nesar collections, comprising a total of 250 volumes.
The most legible Dege Kangyur reproduction, scanned at Matho monastery in Nepal.
Better, re-processed images of the Dege Kangyur from the Library of Congress.
The first 3,500 volumes of the Fragile Palm Leaves collection of Burmese manuscripts, re-processed to follow BDRC’s standards of one page per image.
Please follow us on social media and sign up for our monthly newsletter, to hear as these and other new additions become available, and to receive general BDRC news and announcements.
Secondly, we will be releasing a new User Interface for BUDA later this year. This will simplify searching and browsing and make it easier for you to see the resources available and locate the texts you need. One of the first new features to be released will be an autocomplete function that will suggest the most popular results as you type your search query. You will also see improvements to e-text browsing added over the course of the year. The complete new UI will be launched in the fall, and please note that at this time the legacy TBRC site will go offline.
Finally, for any questions about using the archive, please refer first to the user guide on our website, which is available at these links in English, Tibetan, and Chinese. If you need further help, please contact help@bdrc.io with details of your issue. Please include a brief explanation, and a screenshot if necessary, to help us understand and answer you effectively. Please note that you must be logged into your free account in order to download texts, and that some texts are blocked due to copyright issues.
Our regular Office Hours are another source of assistance. The next round of these drop-in sessions for library users will take place on Wednesday May 22, 2024 in English and Thursday May 23, 2024 in Tibetan. Please visit our website for full details and zoom links.
BDRC’s archive is the largest digital Buddhist library in the world, with more than 73,000 volumes and 29 million pages of Buddhist texts freely accessible to the public. We are committed to keeping these invaluable resources online, but it is expensive to maintain the digital archive and provide librarian services.
