Asiatica Association

A small treasure is now digitally available, a collection of  656 files of books (in pdf format), dating from the 17th century till the present time, on the Aceh civilization, located on the northern part of the island of Sumatra (Indonesia). The books are written in Indonesian, Acehnese, English, Dutch and other European languages and are published locally or by European publishing houses.

The tsunami that struck Aceh on December 2004 destroyed important libraries in Banda Aceh. The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden initiated a project that aimed to digitize the major part of the literature on Aceh kept in the KITLV Library. The Dutch Ministry of Education agreed to finance it.

The award winning films of Ellen Bruno focus on homelessness, Burmese prostitution, Tibetan nuns, health care in Cambodia, and other issues on the forefront of human rights.  

Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia documents the Cambodian's efforts to reconstruct a shattered society in a climate of war, bringing a humanistic perspective to a country in deep political turmoil.

Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy documents human rights abuses in Tibet, focusing on the non-violent activism of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in the struggle for basic human rights and religious freedom.

Princeton University has placed a new digital library of 200 Islamic manuscripts online for scholars to consult and study. These manuscripts were selected from some 9,500 volumes of Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and other languages of the Muslim world in the University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

On March 10, 2009 Buddhists and Tibetans all over the world will celebrate the Tibetan uprising, when an anti-Chinese and anti-Communist revolt erupted in Lhasa. To commemorate the event we want to point out out the beautiful site British Photographers in Tibet: British Photography in Central Tibet 1920 - 1950. You will enjoy pitctures of a country, which is now partly China, partly dead.

The collections are preserved in the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and the British Museum (London). The exceptional photographers are Charles Bell (1870-1945), Frederick Spencer Chapman (1907-1971), Arthur Hopkinson (1894-1953), Rabden Lepcha, Evan Nepean (1909-2002), Hugh Richardson (1905-2000), Harry Staunton (1908-1945). You will also enjoy photographies taken in the expeditions, included in books, and Spencer Chapman’s film rolls.

The CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association) produces highly reliable digital collection of Buddhist texts, available for download and online. There are several options for searching the collection, at CBETA's own Google powered search page, but also the Concordance tool (still in beta) at the Dharma Drum Buddhist College.

Nevertheless, it's more convenient to directly search the collections, without first visiting the Homepage. In Firefox, this is possible with the so called search plugins, which can be added to the search box in the upper right corner of the browser window.

Christian Wittern, Associate Professor at the Documentation and Information Center for Chinese Studies of the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, has created has created three such plugins, to perform searches on the CBETA collection.