To access the full ACIP Master Catalog from the AsiaView program, select the "Tools" item from the main menu bar and click on "ACIP Master Catalog". In the window that appears next, you will find the entire catalog in a convenient database format.

This catalog contains information that drives the entire group tree system for the AsiaView program, meaning that it must be up-to-date and accurate for you to search and view text files successfully. Be careful when attempting to modify the catalog in any way, since this can affect the operation of the entire program. If you accidentally corrupt this file, you can always re-install the program from the Release IV CD-ROM.

As you use the ACIP Master Catalog, you will come across items marked with an "at" sign (@). These represent data such as dates of authors or similar information which ACIP staff have not been able to locate, or about which we have some doubt. We would greatly appreciate any assistance from users who can help us fill in this information.

Please consult the AsiaView User Manual for details on the Master Catalog viewing and search capabilities available in AsiaView.

Here is a brief description of the different kinds of information you will find in the full ACIP Master Catalog:

This is a unique serial number given to each separate work in the ACIP database. A full explanation of the catalog number assignment standards is found in the section called "ACIP File Nomenclature and Catalog Number Conventions" on page 168 of the User Manual.

This field gives the Tibetan title of the work, if it has one. Due to space limitations in this field, we have not included additional Tibetan phrases such as "Herein contained" (BZHUGS SO,) or "Authored by..."

Because this field is limited to 255 characters in order for the database structure to work correctly, there are also cases where we have had to abbreviate very long Tibetan titles. Whenever a title has been abbreviated in any way, it is followed by elision marks (...) to indicate that this has been done, and the full Tibetan title has been included in the "Notes" field, which has no such limitation. Please note that shortened titles in the abbreviated printed catalog at the back of the user manual follow this same convention.

This is either a translation of the Tibetan title, or the original title in the case of works such as reference materials with English titles. The "English title" field also is restricted to 255 characters, and so longer titles have again been abbreviated (to match the abbreviated Tibetan), and elision marks (...) added to the end of the title. In such a case, the full English title will always be included in the "Notes" field, which has no size restriction. The English titles have been translated from the Tibetan by Geshe Michael Roach; we would appreciate any feedback from users who catch any errors in them, or who have any suggestions for improving them.

This field gives the Sanskrit title as found in the Tohoku Catalog, or other authoritative sources. There are many questions about the correct spelling of these titles, and this subject will occupy scholars for many years to come. In general, we have stuck to the Tohoku version, corrected in the case of obvious errors by an expert Sanskrit consultant to the Project, Mr. David Reigle of Colorado, USA. Because the titles are restricted to a specific field and there can be no possible ambiguity, we have treated the diacritics by simply placing them in the next space after the letter to which they refer. Sanskritists will find this system very convenient when using the catalog or AsiaView program menus.

This field gives the Tibetan name of the author. As anyone familiar with Tibetan literature knows, single Tibetan authors may have a wide variety of different names: birth name, novice monk’s name, full monk’s name, secret initiation name, regional nickname, various honorific names, and so on. We have chosen the most common, simple name by which the person is known, including brief initial honorifics where these are quite common.

We have made sure though that you can locate the author by using any piece of their name: you do not have to try to guess exactly how we chose to represent it. Please refer to the instructions in the section called "Searching the ACIP Master Catalog" on page 93. By the time of the next release, we hope to have finished an "authority" look-up table with all possible variations of any particular author’s name.

Please note that, for those authors whose original names were Sanskrit and who also have a translated Tibetan name, both names can be accessed under "Author (in Sanskrit)" and "Author (in Tibetan)," respectively. Names of editors, translators, and contributors or the like are included not in the author field but, on occasion, in the notes or comment field. This is important, especially in those fairly common instances where a close disciple of an eminent Lama has taken down and edited notes of an oral teaching; we have normally attributed the work to the person giving the lectures, and listed the student as an editor in the notes or comment field. You should, therefore, remember to search these fields as well when looking for a particular person.

This field gives the Sanskrit name of the author, as found in the Tohoku Catalog, or other authoritative sources. There is much research to be done on these names, for example, when deciding whether two similar names are referring to the same author or not. Aside from some very basic work, we have not attempted to adjust these names, nor have we made any assumptions that similar names necessarily indicate the same author, since in many cases this would certainly be a mistake. Nor have we attempted to consolidate even different known names of a particular author into one name, for the same reason.

We, therefore, encourage users who wish to search a group of texts that they know to be by the same author to create their own customized group tree, following the instructions in the section entitled "Creating Your Own Pre-Defined Groups of Texts, for Specialized Searches" on page 73.

Again, note that for those authors whose original names were Sanskrit and who also have a translated Tibetan name, both names can be accessed under "Author (in Sanskrit)" and "Author (in Tibetan)," respectively. See "Author (in Tibetan)" section, just above, for a discussion of how we have treated editors, translators, and the like.

The "Author (in English)" field is normally used for non-Tibetan or non-Indian authors of works, and gives the normal English spelling of the author’s name; last name first, and first name second. Again, this field can be searched with even a part of the author’s name, so this order is not important. When a Tibetan author has a generally accepted anglicized name, such as "His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama," this is sometimes included in the "Author (in English)" field; in such case, the corresponding true Tibetan name in Tibetan spelling is included in the "Author (in Tibetan)" field.

Again, see the "Author (in Tibetan)" section above for a discussion of how we have treated editors, translators, and the like.

This field gives the year of birth and of passing away for the author of the work. As any scholar of this material knows, establishing the correct dates for persons over twenty centuries of time, in varying calendrical systems, can be a very difficult process. We have not attempted to undertake any new research into these dates but normally only cite generally accepted authorities. As a first choice for Tibetan authors, we usually go to the dates given by the United States Library of Congress (these are found in the ACIP database files R0007 and R0012).

We also avail ourselves of the dates given in Roerich’s translation of The Blue Annals (Deb-ther sngon-po, R0051); in the timeline section of The Great Dictionary of the Tibetan Language (Tsig-mdzod chen-mo, R0002); and in the biographical sections of the native Tibetan catalog The Treasure of Knowable Things (Shes-bya’i gter-mdzod, R0003 and R0010). We also rely heavily upon the expertise of the incomparable E. Gene Smith, former Asian field director of the Library of Congress and currently head of Himalayan & Inner Asian Resources (HIAR) of New York City. For the dates of Indian authors, we rely almost exclusively on the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophy by Prof. Karl Potter.

In most cases, texts in the Kangyur and Tengyur Collections start off with the title of the work given in Sanskrit, written in Tibetan letters. These are often very helpful in establishing the correct original title, and, incidentally, also provide a very convenient Tibetan-Sanskrit and Sanskrit-Tibetan glossary when digitalized. These titles have each been laboriously re-checked in situ, from the actual text itself, by several members of the ACIP staff: especially Ven. Thupten Tsultrim (Serge Ledan) and Mr. Robert Chilton.

Most major Tibetan works have a full formal title and a separate shorter title by which the text is popularly known. The popular title is found in this field. This is a relatively new detail added to the Master Catalog, and only a few of the texts have their common title listed. Again, we would appreciate any help from users in filling in this information.

Tibetan woodblock prints often contained a shortened title in a small box at the left of the front side of the folio. This field is reserved for titles of this kind. Please note that this field is a new addition to the catalog and has not been completed for very many texts.

This field specifies, with a single letter, the language or languages in which the text is written. At the present time, these letters are the following:

In some instances, an "M" can indicate a mixture of languages such as Tibetan and Sanskrit.

This field specifies the location of the work within a larger collection. In the case of texts from the Kangyur and Tengyur Collections, it gives you the major philosophical section (such as "Vinaya") and the volume number (which is normally a Tibetan letter). In the case of the collected works of a Tibetan author, this field provides not only the volume number but also the order of the work within the volume.

This is important since the ACIP catalog numbers are not serial; locating all the texts of an author is not done by any physical division as in a printed catalog, but rather by sorting on the name of the author in the database. This is much more efficient, since often, for example, we are working with different editions of the same texts, which include them in different orders within the same volumes.

By using this field to compare the numbers of texts within a volume, you can also check whether the entire contents of a volume have been input yet or not. We have further endeavored to assure that you have at your disposal the native catalogs which appear at the beginning of a volume in the collected works of a particular author. You will find these in the "Reference" selection in the main menu, listed by author.

This field is self-explanatory, except that users should be aware that we draw a distinction between "folios" and "pages." We use "folios" to refer to sheets within traditional Tibetan woodblock printings, where one number is used to refer to both the front and back sides together. "Pages" means faces of printed material, as in a Western book. One folio then has two pages, always marked "front" or "back" with the letters "A" and "B".

When only a portion of a text has been completed, the beginning and ending page numbers of just the portion finished to date are included in parentheses to indicate that the count is not yet final.

Occasionally, the Tibetan colophon of a text will clearly indicate where it was printed. If not, we have tried to include enough information either in this field or in the "Notes" field that would allow a user to confirm that a particular printed copy corresponds to the version used for entry. This information would include, for example, names of sponsors, the name of the author of the printing prayer, persons requesting the composition, or the like.

When two different editions of a particular title have been input, a separate "edition" letter appears after the initial letter in the catalog number.

In some cases, though not very frequently, the year in which the text was printed is included in the native colophon at the end. In the years since the Tibetan diaspora, this year has increasingly been given as the Western year. In those cases where the year is listed with the animal and element of the traditional sixty-year cycle, we have taken the Western year from the timeline found at the end of The Great Dictionary of the Tibetan Language (Tsig-mdzod chen-mo, R0002); although users are, of course, aware that the correspondences are not precise, and the first few months of any given Western year may well fall within the Tibetan year prior to the one listed.

This is a field primarily meant for ACIP in-house use. It gives the
file name that was assigned to a text or group of texts on the order form that was used to originally order their input from one of the ACIP overseas data entry centers. The files that are submitted to the American offices are stored on archives with the original input file names, so that any sections that later develop problems can be recovered.

This field gives the byte count of the current roman-letter, database version of the text, to the nearest hundred. This is very useful in estimating the size of a work, and in determining whether an unknown file is the work in question. In the case of an incomplete title, this number is given in parentheses.

This field gives the full file name of the source file that corresponds to the given catalog number. This is the file name you will have
to use if you wish to copy any particular roman-letter text off the CD-ROM or your own hard disk, in order to share it with someone else. The corresponding Tibetan-letter text, by the way, is the file with the same name and an "RTF" extension.

This field gives the current editing status of the text, ranging from first typing to second typing, first comparison, second comparison, final overseas version, concatenated version, and a variety of edit levels established at different stages of domestic automated and final manual text verification. A full description of the edit levels is found in the section called "ACIP Text Verification Procedures" on page 165.

This is simply an index number that the database program needs to store the fields and has no relation to the catalog entries themselves; be careful not to confuse the contents of this field with the catalog number or the database file name.

Included here are special comments about the text. Very typical

are the full Tibetan and full English titles, when these would not fit into the limitation of 255 characters for these fields in the database itself. (When a title has been shortened to meet this limitation, by the way, it is always followed by three periods to indicate an elision.) The "Notes" field is accessed by clicking on the "Notes" tab within the ACIP Master Catalog window.

This field gives a short description of the text to help a user identify it more exactly, especially in a case where the contents of the book may not be evident from its title. This field is accessed by by clicking on the "Description" tab in the ACIP Master Catalog window.

These fields contain the beginning pages of the text, in either roman or Tibetan letters, to help the user determine if it is the one desired. Click on the appropriate tab in the ACIP Master Catalog window to show either preview.

The amount of data coming into the Project from its various overseas centers has increased to the point where it is sometimes necessary for several staff members to be working on the ACIP Master Catalog at the same time. This creates potential "version control" problems unless changes to the Catalog are carefully tracked.

These fields automatically record the name of the person who has either created or made the most recent modification to the particular ACIP Master Catalog entry, and also mark the date and time created or modified.