Remarkable New Resource

[Jonathan Silk]

Cross-posted to H-Buddhism and Indology

My friend and colleague Dan Martin (Jerusalem) has asked me to post 
the following information.

Dan has prepared and posted for free public use a tremendous 
bibliography/biographical resource, taking account mostly of Indian 
and Tibetan works primarily of Buddhist interest. Toward this end he 
has posted his 1769 page (!!) bibliography on a web site in two 
forms, pdf and rtf. These are available for free download for a 
limited time (since they take up space on someone else's server).  Go 
to:


http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~keutzer/martin/



The files are rather big (24 and 11 megs respectively), so use a fast 
connection to download them. Dan writes "For viewing it's also 
necessary to have a relatively new computer and word processing 
system capable of viewing Unicode fonts (I have a pre-Unicode version 
which has not been posted, although it might be if there is any 
demand)."

A development that has just taken place in the last few days is this: 
As I noticed and as anyone else who attempts to use the files will 
notice, their arrangement in a text document is not the most 
efficient way to arrange things. For example, cross-references are 
impossible. The citations are in fact alphabetical by author (with a 
large section of anonymous = mostly canonical works at the 
beginning--note that each author is given what biographical 
information is available, a huge resource in its own right!). 
However, David Germano at Virginia has already volunteered to arrange 
and post the work in a Wikipedia kind of way, especially such that 
users will be able to add citations. This will not, naturally, be 
implemented immediately, however.

Dan's massive work is, as anything done by a single individual with 
individual interests must be, sometimes idiosyncratic. In particular, 
works in East Asian languages are almost entirely absent (as he 
himself notes clearly), so there is much room to supplement the work 
(and as far as I noticed, this also applied to editions, not just 
translations, not only published in East Asian languages, but even 
Skt or Tib editions published, for instance, in Japan.) But this is 
precisely the point of putting the work before the public as a free 
public access resource.

I am confident that readers of this list will join me in offering 
very deepest thanks to Dan Martin for yet another instance of his 
incredible generosity in sharing with all scholars the fruits of  his 
remarkable erudition and seemingly tireless bibliographic and 
biographical quests.

J Silk


-- 
Jonathan Silk
Department of Asian Languages & Cultures
Center for Buddhist Studies
Director of South & Southeast Asian Languages Program
UCLA
290 Royce Hall
Box 951540
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1540
phone: (310) 206-8235
fax:  (310) 825-8808
silk (at) humnet.ucla.edu