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Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to seeking out, preserving, organizing, and disseminating Tibetan Buddhist texts and Tibetan literature. Founded in 1999 by E. Gene Smith, TBRC is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and hosts a digital library of the largest collection of digitized Tibetan texts in the world.

TBRC seeks out and preserves undiscovered texts, organizes them into a library catalog system, and disseminates the library online and to remote locations on hard drives so anyone can read, print, or share the texts. Tibetan language texts are scanned and catalogued by work, genre, subject, person, or place.

TBRC also has offices at the E. Gene Smith Library at Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu, China, and in scanning centers in New Delhi, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal.

Mission
To preserve and share the Tibetan literary heritage through the union of technology and scholarship.

History
In the early 1960s, while working on his PhD. at the University of Washington, E. Gene Smith studied with the Vernerable Dezhung Rinpoche. In 1964, Dezhung Rinpoche encouraged Smith to move to India in order to seek out and study Tibetan books more directly. He gave Smith letters of introduction to show to the lamas living among the Tibetan diaspora.

In 1968 the U.S. Library of Congress hired Smith as a field director in New Delhi to work for the Food for Peace humanitarian effort Public Law 480. Through the program, Smith began to copy and print thousands of Tibetan texts while keeping a version of each one for his own collection.

In 1985 Smith moved from India to Indonesia and then Egypt, along with his collection of text, amassing a collection of 12,000 volumes.

In 1997 Smith retired from the Library of Congress. As digitization technology evolved in the 1990s, Smith realized he needed to make the preserved texts accessible. With friends including Harvard professor and fellow Tibetologist Leonard van der Kuijp, he founded the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts to make the preserved texts accessible.

In 2002 Smith moved TBRC to New York City to the Rubin Museum of Art with the support of Shelley and Donald Rubin. Jeff Wallman was appointed Executive Director by Smith in 2009.

Gene Smith died on December 16, 2010. TBRC had scanned 7,000,000 pages of Tibetan texts at the time of his death.

In 2012 TBRC relocated back to Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA, where the staff hand-picked by Smith remains working on its mission to preserve Tibetan literature.

TBRC today
Currently, the collection contains more than 7,000 works (17,000 volumes, totaling more than 8,000,000 pages) of Tibetan texts. Over 5,000 users per day currently access the website, up from 815 per day in 2006. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 pages are added every year.

More than half the original Public Law 480 collection, plus several thousand acquisitions have been scanned. More than 500,000 bibliographic, biographic, and geographic documents have been scanned and mapped to texts already uploaded in the library. 3,200 library accounts have been give to lineage masters and translators who download more than 100,000 texts per year.

The department heads often travel to TBRC's centers overseas to coordinate more preservation projects. TBRC also coordinates internships with graduate students from Harvard Divinity School and the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard.

Gene Smith's life and TBRC were the subject of the 2012 documentary Digital Dharma, directed by Dafna Yachin of Lunchbox Communications.

Heads of Departments
Executive Director and Director of Technology: Jeff Wallman

Head of Department of Text Preservation: Paldor Zagatse

Head of Department of Literary Research: Michael R. Sheehy

Director of Sustainability: Greg Beier

Board of Directors
Cangioli K. Che, Patricia Gruber, Janet Gyatso, Leonard van der Kuijp, Derek Kolleeny, Richard Lanier, David Lunsford (emeritus), Michele Martin, Timothy J. McNeill, Tudeng Nima Rinpoche, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (honorary), Shelley F. Rubin (emeritus), E. Gene Smith (emeritus, in memoriam), Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, Gray Tuttle, Lama Zopa Rinpoche (honorary), Jeffrey D. Wallman