This talk may be of interest to some. I was a little surprised, though, by the sentence: BUDA provides free and global access to over 25 million pages of Buddhist texts in all of the major canonical languages (Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan), with no mention of Pali…
Indra’s Net for the Information Age: Buddhist Digital Resource Center’s new online library
Invited speaker: Dr. Jann Ronis, Executive Director of Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC)
Date: March 28th, 2022 (Monday)
Time: 10:00 – 11:30 am (Hong Kong Time)
See: https://www.event.buddhism.hku.hk/2022032801
About the lecture
This talk will introduce an innovative new resource in Buddhist Studies. The Buddhist Digital Archives – or BUDA – is an online platform with the largest open access collection of Buddhist texts on the Web. With a sophisticated database that powers research into the Buddhist canons, BUDA provides free and global access to over 25 million pages of Buddhist texts in all of the major canonical languages (Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan) as well as vernacular writings in Burmese, Khmer, Newari, and other Asian languages. This unequaled digital library consists largely of scanned manuscripts and woodblock prints made by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, including millions of pages of old Tibetan, Burmese, and Khmer texts that are not otherwise available outside of remote libraries in Asia. This unique archive is augmented by thousands of volumes in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and other languages that are integrated into BUDA through data sharing practices with other institutions that believe the Buddhist literary heritage should be open access.
BUDA’s advanced bibliographic model unifies this diverse collection of Buddhist works. For instance, BUDA links together versions of sutras so that a researcher can easily locate and access the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan parallels of important scriptures. BUDA also features a massive corpus of Tibetan etexts that are paired page-by-page with the scans of the hardcopies of the same texts.
This talk will involve a demonstration of BUDA and a discussion of salient issues in Buddhist digital humanities. BUDA was developed by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center in Boston, USA, with support from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation. BDRC is the foremost nonprofit dedicated to digitally preserving Buddhist texts and making them freely available to members of the Buddhist tradition, academics, and translators. BDRC is currently involved in major scanning projects in Mongolia, Thailand, and Cambodia. To get a preview of the site please visit www.bdrc.io