Asiatica Association

The Research Centre for Buddhist Philology of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology of Soka University (Japan) has made freely available online the first 11 volumes of the series Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica (BPPB) 1998-2010 in PDF. Since the books are complete, downloading takes a while, but it is worth waiting.

Some titles: Vol. VI. Michael Zimmermann, A Buddha Within: The Tathagatagarbhasutra... (2002); Vol. IX. D. Stevenson and H. Kanno, The Meaning of the Lotus Sutra's Course of Ease and Bliss... (2006); Vol. X. J.

The French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) based in India offers seven doctoral scholarships in the fields of Ecology, Indology and Social Sciences. The scholarships are open to people of all nationalities who wish to work on a topic that is in relation with the research programmes conducted at the IFP.

A freely accessable and very specialized online publication: the Japanese Garden Dictionary - A Glossary for Japanese Gardens and Their History, compiled and edited by Ono Kenkichi and Walter Edwards. This online dictionary is based on the Bilingual Dictionary of Japanese Garden Terms, published in 2001. In 2004 portions of that work were subsequently incorporated by Ono Kenkichi in a Japanese language publication.

It has just been published by the French Institute of Pondicherry a DVD-Rom study on biodiversity in Western Ghats, a world biodivesity hotspot. It is in English, Kannada and Malayalam and is titled BIOTIK: Biodiversity Informatics and Co-Operation in Taxonomy for Interactive Shared Knowledge Base.
Western Ghats v 1.0. A multimedia identification system of evergreen tree species of the Western Ghats, India, by B. R. Ramesh, N. Ayyappan, P. Grard, J. Prosperi, S. Aravajy, J-P. Pascal…[et al.]. Collection Ecologie n°46, IFP, 2010.

The book by Ropharat Aphijanyatham Perceptions of Borders and Human  Migration: The Human (In)Security of Shan Migrant Workers in Thailand (Irasec – Observatoire - Occasional Paper n°1, September 2009, 84 pp), is freely available from the IRASEC, the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia, and the Observatoire des Trafics Illegaux Transfontaliers dans la Sous-region du Mekong.

The National Mission for Manuscripts was established in February 2003, by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India. The Mission seeks to unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India. The country possesses an estimate of five million manuscripts, probably the largest collection in the world, which constitute the 'memory' of India's history, heritage and thought. These manuscripts lie scattered across the country and beyond, in numerous institutions as well as private collections, often unattended and undocumented. The National Mission for Manuscripts aims to locate, document, preserve and render these accessible -- to connect India's past with its future, its memory with its aspirations. This is Kritisampada, the National Database of Manuscripts of India.

It is my pleasure to post info on a new resource, which has ben written by Dr. Marcus Bingenheimer, Director of the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Taiwan:

Dharma Drum Buddhist College has published a new resource. Those of you doing research on Taiwanese history and religion might be interested in our database of Buddhist temples in Taiwan.

What you find at this website is an interface that lets you query the location of temples in various ways, get historical information about them and access an image database. Since part of the data is also referenced in time it is possible to construct queries such as: show which Buddhist temples existed in Taipei in 1900. Since we mostly cater to a Chinese-reading audience so far the interface is in Chinese only.

The Digital Library of the University of Delhi has put full texts of books (in pdf) online. Actually, it is not possible to know the name of the collections, and from the list of authors the library looks rather small; on the contrary, teh digital library lists 3872 subjects so far.