Frequently Asked Questions

Nothing except an email address. Anyone can register for a free account on BDRC within minutes. Choose a password and an email address, which we will use to authenticate your account, or simply sign up using your existing Apple, Google, or Baidu account. Your free BDRC library account will give you access to thousands of Buddhist texts and allow you to download these texts as well.

If you have previously registered for a BDRC account on tbrc.org, you will need to create a new account on library.bdrc.io. Your tbrc.org username and password will NOT work for library.bdrc.io. Click the "Register" link at the top of the page on library.bdrc.io to create your new BDRC library account. Registration is free and easy.

For access to copyrighted texts, please refer to our access policies for more information about what we are allowed to share under copyright law. Some copyrighted material is available on a limited basis via our partnership with Internet Archive. For other special access questions, please write to us at help@bdrc.io with more information describing your access level on tbrc.org and the reason why you had it. Our staff will manually process your request and determine your eligibility for special access. We may be able to provide special access to some scans but we cannot provide unlimited access to BDRC's entire collection.

Some works are restricted by BDRC and not available to users, or only available on a limited basis, even when you are logged in. Common reasons for restriction include:

1. 1. 1. Limited access due to copyright: BDRC's library includes works that are under copyright and we must limit access to these works to respect the rights of copyright holders in accordance with copyright law.
      2. Sealed Texts: BDRC respects certain cultural restrictions on specific texts, restricting access only to those who have received the proper teachings.

You can read more about our access policies here. BDRC's twin goals of preservation and access mean that we recognize the need to preserve materials we cannot make accessible yet. If you see a work in our library that should be restricted according to one of the above categories but isn't, please contact us at help@bdrc.io to let us know.

In brief, a Work is conceptual and a Version is a specific representation of the concept contained in the Work. You can learn more about how BUDA uses Works and Versions, and how to improve your searches, here.

BDRC's new Work and Version model follows BIBFRAME2.0, which is becoming the new standard in library catalogs. Some minor differences may appear but in general:

1. 1. 1. A Work records the information on the intellectual work (author, date of composition, genre, etc.).
      2. A Version (or Instance) records the information related to a particular expression of a Work (publisher, block carver, date of copy for a manuscript, etc.).

A Work is often linked to multiple Versions. Given the number of records in our library, BDRC's migration to the new model was made automatically and some errors may exist; feedback is most welcome.

The bottom of a particular Monastery Page, Drepung (G108) for example, will have a Related Resources hyperlink that will allow you to view various data types associated with the institution. For instance, you can view Associated Persons, Associated Places, Associated Works etc. Regarding Associated Works and Versions, you can even refine the search to view texts published by a particular institution or printery, for instance, Drepung Monastic Printery. This feature still needs fine-tuning and we need to add more data, but it is an available feature on the new site.

It's important to note that we don't have e-texts available for all texts, but they are available for about 25% of our Tibetan collection. Next to the Version, you can click on E-text and then click to open the volume in E-text Viewer. You can view the e-text page by page. At the bottom of the E-text Viewer page, you can click to download the e-text in full. 

BDRC's corpus of e-texts is made up of "born digital" e-texts that were typed into the computer as well as e-texts that were generated by OCR (Optical Character Recognition). As e-texts allow readers to search specifically within a text for a word or a string of text, we do our best to generate new e-texts to facilitate your search.

Please make sure that your spellings are correct. If you still cannot find the text you are searching for, please write to us at help@bdrc.io with more information, including the title and author, and a librarian will help you. Generally the more information you can give us about the text you are looking for, the easier it is for us to help you.

Please try logging out of your BDRC library account, clearing your cache, and logging back in. To clear your cache in: 

Chrome

1) Open Chrome and click More at the top right; 2) Click More Tools; 3) Click Clear Browsing Data

 Safari

1) Click Safari on the top left; 2) Click Clear Browsing Data

As mentioned in the User Guide, you can search Topics from the main search bar by selecting "Topics" from the drop down menu and typing in the name of the topic you wish to search. On the search results page, you can also refine any keyword search according to Genre/Topic using the filters on the left-hand side of the page.

However, if you wish to search or browse a pre-selected list of topics, you can do so here. We are currently working on an improved interface for browsing the list of topics.

The tbrc.org URLs will continue to work forever. For the next few months, tbrc.org will continue to operate. When tbrc.org gets retired, all the URLs will be redirected to the new website for perpetuity.

For user purposes, the Work IDs remain the same (with the addition of "bdr:" as a prefix). Other BDRC IDs, such as IDs for Person, Place, Lineage, Role and Corporation also remain the same. Searching for ID numbers such as P64, G108 or W8LS27883 will pull up the same record in library.bdrc.io as they did in tbrc.org.

On BUDA, you might notice several new prefixes that appear with ID numbers. These prefixes correspond with different categories in BDRC's bibliographic model. ID numbers that begin with MW (e.g. MW2PD20323) refer to Versions of a Work and, in the vast majority of cases, correspond with one set of images. Records on tbrc.org that had an "O" prefix (Outline) have been mapped to MW IDs on library.bdrc.io. The prefix WA (e.g. WA4CZ16799) is used to denote Works in BDRC's bibliographic model.

There are multiple ways to download texts on bdrc.io. First, you need to set up an account with us and log into the website. Once you have your account set up, you can follow the instructions in this screencast. It will show you multiple ways you can download the texts in the new interface.