ACIP has made a concerted effort to input or license a large amount of reference material—dictionaries, book catalogs, history texts, and other types of documentation that will help us locate the important classical Asian books still left in the world, and also enable our users to study these books to the fullest. Following is a summary of some of the tools we have created:

• Two completely new arrivals on this release are the St. Petersburg Catalogs. Over the past five years, a team of refugee Tibetan monks has labored to create these electronic catalogs, with the help of experts from two of the world’s greatest libraries of Tibetan woodblock prints: the Library of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Library of the University of St. Petersburg. Between them, these two libraries house roughly 200,000 Tibetan titles. On the CD-ROM you will find over 50,000 of these books cataloged in extensive detail, including the complete traditional information from the back of each book about where it was printed, who passed it down over the centuries, and so on. Copies of these books can also be requested from the libraries, which makes them a tremendous resource sinceŃdue to political and economic problemsŃbooks from many parts of Tibet are still difficult to obtain. You will find more information about these catalogs below.

• The reference section includes the complete documentation of all ACIP releases, and Project policies and standards. Here you will find valuable tools for successfully searching the database, utilizing the software used by the Project, more about its history, and so on. Perhaps the most important reference document here is the ACIP Master Catalog, which gives detailed information about each book we have input to date. A very concise printed catalog, with only the author and title of each book (in Tibetan, English, and also Sanskrit where applicable) is found at the back of this User Manual.

• This section also contains major listings of the Tibetan and Sanskrit books held by the United States Library of Congress. Since many of these books were obtained under the PL480 and SFCP programs of the U.S. Congress, copies can be found in more than 15 public and university libraries around the country.

Please be aware that due largely to the lack of sufficient funding for the Library’s distribution services there are some gaps in the very new and much older data. Perhaps a group of ACIP users in America could approach their representatives in Congress to urge them to provide more support for this valuable resource. In the meantime, we have included here a very useful file called Handlist of PL480 Acquisitions, a brief personal list of almost all of the PL480 and SFCP works ever obtained, and supplied to the Project by the director of these efforts, Dr. E. Gene Smith.

• ACIP has input a number of good dictionaries for studying Tibetan, although not all of them are included on the public release, since they are still under copyright. These are available only for the in-house use of scholars doing research directly related to the Project. Perhaps the most important of these works is the Great Dictionary of the Tibetan Language, a three-volume Tibetan-Tibetan dictionary which is destined to become a classic. ACIP has also assisted the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in inputting a major new English-Tibetan dictionary, which is still in the editing stage and not yet publicly available. The on-line dictionary of Mr. James Valby of the USA, finally, has been supplied to ACIP without charge for the current release; although written with the general user in mind, it will nevertheless be useful to scholars, supplying a helpful list of Tibetan words and their basic English equivalents. A number of dictionaries which include Tibetan and Sanskrit are described further on.

• The reference section has some very good native catalogs of the Kangyur and Tengyur Collections themselves, including those for the Lhasa and Derge editions of the Kangyur, and the Derge and Sertri editions of the Tengyur. These catalogs are quite helpful for locating the older books, since their titles appear in a variety of different spellings and are most easily located with the help of a computer.

• ACIP has devoted a lot of effort to inputting various printed catalogs of important native Tibetan books, since these are the most endangered; the catalog information helps us identify surviving copies of these books in various locations around the world. There are more than ten major catalogs of this kind completed, although again some are copyrighted and available only for in-house use. These catalogs include The Tohoku University Catalog of Native Tibetan Literature; The Treasure House of Knowable Things (Shes-bya’i gter-mdzod); Titles for Commentaries written by Tibetan Authors (Bod-kyi bstan-bcos khag gi mtsan-byang); The Catalog to the Collected Works of the Masters of the Sakyas (Sa-skya bka’-’bum); catalogs to important monastery collections such as the Library of Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche; and a great number of other native catalogs to specific authors, including the majority of the lists found in massive Materials for a History of Tibetan Literature, edited by Dr. Lokesh Chandra. A handlist to the Tibetan holdings in the Bernard Collection of Yale University has also been input, as have traditional lists (gsan-yig) of the great books passed down through major Lamas throughout the history of Tibet.

• The Project has input a number of important historical works, including various indices to the early Tibetan chronicles known as the Blue Annals. We have also received, from the American researcher Mr. Robert Lacey, a very rough, experimental version of the Blue Annals itself that was generated by digitally scanning the entire text of Roerich’s English translation. (It is still very useful, and we would be thrilled to have some users volunteer to help correct it.) The English translation of the excellent survey of Tibetan literature by the Russian scholar A.I. Vostrikov is also completed. Again some copyright restrictions apply in the case of these works.

• Finally, the complete updated ACIP International Asian Scholars Database is included in this new release, listing the names and contact information for some 600 colleagues who have agreed to published in this directory.