Two of the greatest collections of Tibetan woodblock prints exist far from Tibet, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The first collection, at the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, contains approximately 25,000 volumes, representing up to 200,000 titlesÑalthough we do expect a good number of repeat titles by the time we are finished. The second collection is found at the Oriental Library, a part of the Library of the University of St. Petersburg. It is a carefully selected treasure of 3,300 separate titles.

The books in each of these collections have been faithfully collected by generations of Russian explorers and scholars ever since the time of the tsars, and maintained with devotion by library staff even in the most difficult of times, such as the three-year siege of St. Petersburg during World War II.

ACIP staff first visited the collections of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. Many hours of work, in collaboration with the library directors and staff, went into the design of the project. Russian and Mongolian scholars from a number of different institutionsÑthe Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg University, and the Kuntsechnoienei Datsang Buddhist SocietyÑhelped us with every aspect of accomplishing this kind of project: visa and immigration work for the Tibetan refugee scholars who would come and do the input of the catalog; housing and travel arrangements; preparing and equipping a working office; and hundreds of other details.

The cataloging project has been working now for some twelve years, with devoted labors by a team of native scholars from Sera Mey Tibetan Monastery in south India, under the direction of the Russian library staff. It has truly been an international collaboration of Russian, Tibetan, and American citizens working together with respect and affection, producing a work that we hope will be a lasting contribution to all those who study these great books and ideas in the centuries to come. The catalog as it stands now contains more than 50,000 entries; the Tibetan input operators are typing in the entire colophon of each work, with valuable information on the Tibetan teaching lineages and other historical detail; the resulting catalog already contains over fifty times more material than the most famous Tibetan catalog to date, the Tohoku.

By keeping each file the size of 1000 entries it keeps it convemient to download for our website. Our catalog work has now reached the 100,000 title mark. We anticipate another 2 years to complete all 112,000 listings. ACIP has maIde a commitment during this time to assist the Tibetan Collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies in setting up reproduction facilities that will allow the Institute to fulfill orders from interested persons for copies of texts they need to work with. It is hoped that the existence of this reproduction facility, and the fees paid to the Institute by scholars for copies, will help defray the considerable cost of maintaining this precious treasure for future generations. Please contact ACIP if you are interested in ordering materials from either collection, and we will forward your request directly to the appropriate office.

As a final note, the Catalog Project in St. Petersburg has generated an intriguing side-effort, which is a growing graphics collection of all the exquisite monastic and other seals found stamped on the wood-block manuscripts of the collections. The presence of a seal is recorded in the St. Petersburg Catalog, and the seals each have their own unique identification number under the "GSP" file series in the ACIP Graphics Collections.

The seals, as well as carved illustrations of eminent teachers throughout history located in both the St. Petersburg collections and in other texts input by ACIP, are indexed and cataloged in a format that allows them to be integrated into the ACIP Master Catalog. To see if there is an illustration of a particular person or image available, check the graphics entries of the ACIP Master Catalog by clicking on the catalog number column in AsiaView and searching those that start with "G".

We have not, by the way, made any extensive efforts to identify the various symbols in the seals of the St. Petersburg collections, nor have we made any attempt to relate particular seals to the original monastic library that used them. We would very much appreciate any help that specialists could offer us in identifying the symbols or relating seals to their original institution.

The following is a list of some of the dedicated individuals who have made the St. Petersburg Catalog possible:

• The St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

• The University of St. Petersburg:

• The Kuntsechnoienei Datsang Buddhist Society:

and with special thanks to the invaluable Dr. Elena Kharkova