The Truck Outside the Library

Geshe Michael calls this archive the truck outside the library — a great load of treasure that has arrived but has not yet been carried inside, unpacked, and given its place on the shelves. With gratitude for the trust of being handed the keys, I opened the truck and looked carefully through everything in it: what is there, how much of it is new to my shelves, and a few things I noticed that may help ACIP finish the work of bringing it in. Nothing here has been placed in any catalogue — it is my working inventory, offered with respect for your review and guidance.

What the archive holds

The material is almost entirely ACIP-format transliterated text (only a few dozen scans). Its catalogable heart is the 631 whole-collection .ALL volumes that hold identified works, organised in two areas — the monthly “Input Orders” and the “ACIP unsplit volumes” folders — together with thousands of per-work .ACT files. Grouping the volumes by their BDRC work-ids and by reading each file’s opening, they resolve to 174 distinct collections — from a single author’s multi-volume collected works (such as Thuken’s sixteen volumes) to compilations of many short texts.

The works — 5,989 identified across 174 collections

Reading each collection’s table of contents (dkar chag) where present, and its internal work-boundaries where not, I identified and gave a provisional id to 5,989 individual works — of which 5,300 are new to my library and 689 I already hold. (Three items are reference works, not an author’s compositions: the Roerich Tibetan–Russian–English dictionary, a Nepal manuscript catalogue, and a Derge Kangyur sample.) The richest collections:

The authors behind the works

Resolving each collection to its true author — reading the file’s author field or its “Collected Works of” title page, and merging one master’s several spellings into a single name — the works are the hand of 82 distinct masters. Of them, 45 are wholly absent from my catalogue, even by name — new voices led by Jigten Gonpo, Shamarpa II, Namkha Senge, Patrul Rinpoche and Yongzin Yeshe Gyaltsen. And by content, I already hold only 689 of all 5,989 works here, so almost every work of almost every master is new to me. A further 4 collections are multi-author compilations, counted apart. A full author-by-author breakdown — each name in both its English pronunciation and its transliteration exactly as typed — is in the companion page:

→ The Authors in the Un-catalogued Archive

Something ACIP may wish to know — incomplete scanned collections

Each volume’s header states how many volumes the collection should have. Comparing that with the volumes present, 6 collections in the archive are missing volumes — that is, the scan set appears incomplete. Most notably, the collected works of Rendawa (Red mda’ ba) declare ten volumes but only eight are present (volumes 7 and 10 are absent).

Where the missing volumes can be found. For the collections that carry a BDRC work-id, I checked BDRC’s public archive: in every case the volumes missing here are already scanned at BDRC — Rendawa’s volumes 7 and 10 (592 and 580 pages), and the missing volumes of three further collections. They are page-images, not yet typed in ACIP form; but the source to complete the typed set exists and is viewable. (Two collections carry no clean BDRC id and are noted for review.)

What Rendawa’s two missing volumes contain. Reading BDRC’s scanned text, I could name the works themselves — and I confirmed that neither is present in my archive or my catalogued library under any name:

• Volume 7 — his great commentary on the Pramāṇavārttika (logic and valid perception): Tsad ma rnam ’grel gyi rnam bshad Rigs pa’i ’dod ’jo (“The Wish-Granting Cow of Reasoning”), in four chapters.
• Volume 10 — his commentaries on the Abhidharmasamuccaya (the higher knowledge): Dam pa’i chos mngon pa kun las btus pa’i rgya cher ’grel pa Legs par bshad pa’i rgya mtsho (“The Ocean of Excellent Explanation”) and its essence-summary Legs bshad nor bu’i phreng ba (“A String of Jewels of Fine Explanation”).

How this was done, and how far to trust the numbers

Every count in this report has been verified, and the figures shown are deliberately conservative — they are what remains after removing everything that is not a genuine, separate work. The inventory was built in three passes. First, each collected-works volume in the archive was read and its individual works identified — including volumes with no table of contents, and works whose titles the earlier automatic pass had missed. Second, every extracted title was checked back against its own source file: 99.8% were found verbatim in the text, confirming that nothing was invented. Third, a two-stage quality review removed what was not a standalone work: table-of-contents lines and section headings that had been picked up as if they were works, printed under one honest total; edition-duplicates of the same text appearing in more than one volume; and external microfilm catalogues, which describe manuscripts rather than hold them. Each was also checked against our existing catalogue so that a work we already hold is never counted as new. A long history or commentary is counted as the single work it is, not as its many chapters. The full, searchable inventory accompanies this report, and the small number of genuinely ambiguous cases are flagged for review rather than counted silently.

Appendix — the archive’s five libraries at a glance

The shared Dropbox holds five top-level libraries. The new works described in this report come from the two that contain whole-collection .ALL volumes; the largest library by size is ACIP-format canon and reference material rather than new author-writings.

A note on individual single-text files

Alongside the collected-works volumes counted above, the archive also holds a number of individual single-text files — a single sadhana, prayer, or commentary saved on its own rather than inside a collected-works volume. A quick sampling indicates that these are, for the most part, texts we already hold: either in the library or among the works kept aside and not yet catalogued. They are therefore left aside for now and are not part of the count in this report.