Creating Orientalistic Resources and Data-bases at Centre of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of the Institute of Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS
Tzymzhit P. Vanchikova
Conference Presentation

As it is known the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Monuments of IMBTS keeps one of the largest collections of manuscripts and xylographs in the Tibetan and Classical Mongolian languages, rich archive funds and a collection of painted and printed (xylographic) icons, Buddhist cult objects and sculpture statuettes of the Northern Buddhist pantheon deities.   

The initial preconditions of the work on compiling electronic orientalistic resources and data-bases at our Centre were caused by the tasks of urgent necessity of accounting, inventorying and description of a large amount of sources and documents. The overwhelming majority of the books, especially in the Tibetan fund, were not even taken into account. By the middle of 1990-ies only 7500 Tibetan texts were taken into account and registered in a card-catalogue.

The primary task of our group was and still is to create resources and databases, to compile a local electronic catalogue centre for the general use, publish catalogues and descriptions of the collections, and to prepare for publication some of the most valuable monuments of the written legacy of the peoples Inner Asia.

During 1999-2006 these activities were supported by Russian foundation for humanities.
At present Tibetan electronic catalogue includes about 20000 records, Mongolian about 6000 records and archival about 3000 records. I have to mention with gratitude the ACIP (Asian Classics Input Project) experience that was of great help for us in compiling our Tibetan catalogue.
In the report an attempt to present the results of our work for the last 10 years will be done.

Documentation of Buddhist Heritage in India
Dr. D. Dayalan, Archaeological Survey of India

The places associated with Buddha are many; and some of them gained great renown in subsequent days as leading centres of Buddhism. Of them, the Four Great Places namely Lumbini where the Buddha was born, Bodh-Gaya which witnessed his Enlightenment, Sarnath where the First Sermon was delivered and Kusinagara where he passed away are embellished with monuments of varied kinds. Four other places though of a somewhat lesser importance in Buddha’s life, namely, Sankissa where he descended from the Trayastrimsa heaven, Sravasti where he performed miracles in order to confound the six heretical teachers, Rajgir where he tamed Nalagiri and Vaisali where he was offered a bowl of honey by a monkey also became the scene of monumental activities. Every spot associated with Buddha are immortalized and turned into a centre of pilgrimage by his followers who erected, generation after generation, structures in the hollowed memory of the master. It is mentioned that Buddha himself had suggested on his death-bed that stupas should be erected over his mortal remains. This injection lay at the root of the stupa-cult, which made the worship of stupas an essential feature of early Buddhism. Ten stupas, including the two built over the urn and embers sprang up immediately after the demise of Buddha. The Emperor Asoka (circa 273-236 BC) is said to have opened up seven out of eight original stupas and distributed the relic contained therein among innumerable stupas erected by him. In addition to the stupas there many other Buddhist relics such as monasteries, chaityas, rock-cut caves, temples, sculptures, bronzes, paintings, etc are spread all over India, notwithstanding the earliest Buddhist monuments however cropped up in what is known today as Uttar Pradesh (North-Eastern part), Bihar and Nepalese Tarai. On the basis of the clue from the inscriptions, accounts given in indigenous and foreign texts and place names, a host of scholars and others explored the country and plotted large number of places yielding Buddhist relics through out India. The present paper dealt in detail about the documentation work carried out by the author on the Buddhist heritages in Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, the two major states in India.

An Analysis on the Chapters of Chosŏn Topography Books Regarding People
Cho Kwang and Han Hyungju, Institute of Korean Culture, Korea University, South Korea

This paper tries to analyze those chapters of Chosŏn topography books regarding people of the period that have been put in the database of Chosŏn topography books by the Institute of Korean Culture at Korea University since 2004. The results of this work were to be reflected in our Electric Cultural Atlas. Since Sejongsillok Jiriji was published in 15th century, there existed several major topography books such as Sinjŭngdongukyŏjisŭnglama in 16th century and YŏJitosŏ in 18th century. Among the various contents of those topography books, the chapters such as Figures, Famous Subjects, Recluses, Chaste Women, Filial Sons, and Filial Daughters contain huge sources of information on people who lived in that period. In this work, we first statistically analyzed local origins, social status, official career, and social activities of more than 5000 people extracted from our database and found out some changes and trends. Then, we tried to visualize this work in our Electric Cultural Atlas of Chosŏn in order to see if we could identify certain periodical changes and regional differentials in people's lives and cultural landscapes of the period. This work will enable us to see various social and cultural phenomena of the time such as people's lives, developments of local communities, and Confucian transformation of the society at a very vivid local level.   

The Reference Collection in the Digital Library
Michael Buckland, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Understanding depends on knowing context: For a topic one needs to know more about it; for a place one needs to know where it is, its geographical context and its history; an event needs to be seen in the context of its times and other events; mention of a person raises questions about what else he or she did and with whom they were associated; and so on.

In the paper library, the reference collection played a very useful role. It is a distilled, concentrated library, with well-chose selection of the best and most up-to-date resources organized into a careful arrangement.

The literature on library reference service focuses on high-tech support for the call-center role of the reference librarian, but not on the reference *collection*.  Somehow in moving to the digital library environment the reference collection has been neglected, and even when present, its valued functionality is lacking. And there are some reasons and remedies.

1. The reference library in the Internet Public Library is admirable but it is a digital mimicking of the technology of the codex: First select a book, then search in it for facts by drilling-down and backing out. But in a digital environment the relationship between book and facts should be reversed: Search directly for the facts, then, maybe, consider the source, as in Google.

2. Text search and display is not sufficient: For places you need map interfaces, for events time-lines, etc.

3. In the traditional reference collection one can move easy among encyclopedias, gazetteers, chronologies, biographies, biographical dictionaries, . . . . like a bee gathering pollen from flowers. In the delegated digital environment, interfaces for this are still needed.

4. Vocabulary issues are exacerbated: Vocabulary control within thesauri is understood; the logic of a network is that vocabulary mapping between different thesauri becomes important; so does mapping between vocabularies genres that have hitherto been considered comparable. For example, the geographic descriptions codes (aka feature types, e.g. Lighthouse) in a gazetteer represent physical objects not concepts, but mapping them to library subject headings allows smooth transition between literature about, say, lighthouses, and real world examples of actual lighthouses.

In this paper I present current findings about these issues.