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BRIEF INTRODUCTION
In order to better coordinate research effort among Buddhism scholars in Taiwan, Ven. Shih Hen-ching and other faculty members of the Department of Philosophy of the National Taiwan University founded the Center for Buddhist Studies of NTU in 1995. Among the center’s first projects was the creation of the Buddhist Studies Internet Database, which acts as a repository for Buddhism research materials that could be accessed by scholars and researchers around the world.
In October 1999, again with the effort of Ven. Shih Hen-ching, President Wei-Cho Chen of NTU and Master Sheng Yen, the founder of Dharma Drum Mountain Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, signed an agreement to expand the contents and functions of the site and renamed the it as the Digital Library and Museum of Buddhist Studies (DLMBS).
On April 1, 2003, the National Taiwan University Library assumed the responsibility of maintaining DLMBS, with the University Librarian, Professor Jieh Hsiang, as the Principle Investigator. In order to better coordinate with other digitization projects, the DLMBS focused on the collection of secondary materials to provide more comprehensive services to the Buddhism research community.
In 2009, the College of Liberal Arts of NTU took over as the major sponsor of the project, with support from the Research Center for Digital Humanities and Professor Jieh Hsiang, the Director of RCDH, as the PI. The main focus of this phase is to enhance the quality as well as increase the quantity of the collected research literature. Since then, we have added more than 240,000 record entries to the database. We have also built the “Authoritative Buddhist Author Database”, an authority file with
120,542 authors. We have also incorporated new technical features and full-text search to improve quality and to enhance the user experience.
With support and encouragement from various organizations and scholars, the DLBS currently contains 498,291 record entries and 140,841 full-text articles from over 9,500 journals and databases, and features full text search engine, the Authoritative Buddhist Author Database, Journals included, a 5-language keyword alignment database, subject classification, and many other features.
DLBS is built by the Buddhist Studies research community and for the community. Although we receive some funding from the National Taiwan University, but its operation depends heavily on volunteer work. It cannot survive without your continuing support. If you use resource from DLBS in your work, please cite the source. If you know of journals that you think should be included, please let us know. If you have research articles that you would like to authorize to be included in DLBS, please also contact us. If you wish to make monetary contribution to our effort, please click here.
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