Gifted by the executive director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centre (TBRC) in New York, Mr Gene Smith, religious texts like Kangyur, Tengyur, Rinchen Tenzoed and several other collected works of numerous Buddhist scholars have been scanned and stored in a single hard disk.
Mr Smith, who previously worked at the US library of Congress, New Delhi, as the field director had collected thousands of Buddhist texts, scanned, and stores it in computer hard disks.
“We are grateful to Mr Smith and the board of directors of the TBRC for the valuable gift,” said the director of the national library, Mynak Trulku. “This will greatly enhance the great collection of the library in Bhutan which already has a computerised archive system. For the time being the hard disk will be installed in one of the computers at the national library where it will be open to public.
“Anyone can come, browse the contents and take page print outs,” said Mynak Trulku. The contents of the hard disk will not be put on a website as the volume is too large and would prove expensive.
However, with a programme called the Pelri Parkang (meaning the glorious mountain printing house), the director said that books can be printed in the form of pechas (traditional books) and potis (volumes) with prints on both the sides.
Pelri Parkang was established on November 2002 with the intention to develop cost-effective print-on-demand techniques that utilise the TBRC digital archives to produce high-quality texts for use by lamas, scholars and practitioners.
According to the director, the library may acquire the software, which will also be a gift, by September this year with someone coming over from the TBRC to train the personnel and install the software. “With this new kind of technology, one can print the particular ritual books in the collection easily,” he added.
The hard disk was presented to the director of national library, Mynak Trulku by the minister for labour and human resources, Lyonpo Ugen Tshering who initiated the whole proceeding. The prime minister, Lyonpo Jigmi Y Thinley who inaugurated the hard disk expressed his appreciation for Mr Smith’s donation and also commended Lyonpo Ugen Tshering for his initiative.
The CD ROM of some of the editions of the texts had already been brought in the country by Lyonpo Ugen Tshering during his recent visit to New York.
The Tibetan Buddhist resource centre, Inc. was established with the sole purpose to promote research and scholarship in Tibetan Buddhism and advance the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage by making its literary tradition widely available in the form of digital images.
