World libraries: Harvard Library will help preserving the Tibetan literary heritage

The Harvard Library, starting from July, will upload to the electronic catalogue of the library about 10 million pages from 100 thousand books of Tibetan literary heritage, which survived after the destruction during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. 

The fact is that in the result of the Chinese revolution which lasted 10 years (1966-1976) suffered about 700 thousand books out of a total 8 thousand, presented the value for Tibetan and Chinese literature.

Such data belong to Jim Smith – a scholar of Tibetan studies and librarian, who worked since 1968 in the New Deli department of the Library of Congress. During 17 years he was managed to collect his personal unique collection of books of Tibetan literature. It was by his initiative when they gathered a Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), which together with the Harvard Library preserved in the electronic form all the works of the Chinese-Tibetan literature.

This resource has a status of the non-profit organization and is located in Cambridge. Since its founding in 1999 specialists of the Center deal with scanning in the electronic view of Tibetan books, In 2002 the resource center for 10 years moved from Cambridge to New York, but already in 2012 it relocated to Harvard square. Despite the move, all this time the center is successfully working on the systematization, preservation and presentation for the public use of the great Tibetan literary heritage.