(10 April 2018) The National Taiwan University Research Center for Digital Humanities is responsible for maintaining and operating the Digital Library and Museum of Buddhist Studies (DLMBS), a website devoted to compiling bibliographies, full-text articles, and other research resources in the field of Buddhist studies.
The DLMBS was established by Prof. Heng-Ching Shih of the NTU Center for Buddhist Studies in 1995, and remains one of NTU’s major contributions to the development of scholarly digital resources for the international academic community.
The DLMBS has been chosen by the National Central Library four years in a row as the representative website for religious and social studies in its annual publication Selected Digital Resources for Chinese Studies in Taiwan.
Furthermore, the website is also the only Chinese-language, religion-related, and Taiwan-based digital library to gain a ranking among the ‘100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access,’ compiled by CollegeDegree.com.
The library maintains a bibliography consisting of over 400,000 entries and more than 40,000 full-text articles in 45 languages and 15 types of data. Besides this exhaustive list of publications in Buddhist studies, the library also offers online sutras, language lessons, a Buddhist museum, as well as the Buddhist Author Authority Database, which provides a list of nearly 100,000 authors. With this abundance and variety of archives and resources, the DLMBS is second to none among international websites devoted to religious studies.
Currently, the DLMBS’s users represent 212 countries worldwide, and the site receives 7,000 visits per day. Having accumulated nearly 20 million visits since its launch in 2006, the website is recognized as a highly valuable research resource by international academia and scholars in Buddhist studies.
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