The idea for the preservation project is born at the Pyne Hall offices of the Department of Classics of Princeton University. Princeton Department of Classics chairman, Prof. Samuel D. Atkins (1911-2002), an expert of Greek, Latin, & Sanskrit, joins the project advisory board; as does Prof. William LaFleur (1936-2010), of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Extraordinary scholar and visionary Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin (1921-2004) becomes the inspiration and chief literary advisor to the project.

The founding team of the project assembled: Director, Michael Roach, Princeton University graduate & liaison; Assistant Director, Robert Taylor PhD, of the U.S. Department of Transportation; John Malpas, developer of Tibetan input software; Steve Bruzgulis, inventor of first Tibetan word processor; and Ven. Thupten Pelgye, overseas input center manager. Robert Chilton provides invaluable technical expertise, especially as Unicode is developed as a universal standard for computer fonts

The project receives a grant from the Hewett-Packard Foundation to build its first data entry center in the South Indian town of Bylakuppe.

Licenses the Tibetan and Sanskrit listings of the U.S. Library of Congress and converts listings to easily searchable form for public release; staff are selected for advising the Library of Congress on future purchases of Tibetan-language materials, and produces a catalog of 1,100 titles for acquisition.

The first public release of data is made on several large floppy disks sent through the mail to each user! The release consists of 10 books, including all five of the ancient Indian classics covered during the classical Tibetan Buddhist education, as well as the native catalogs to the Kangyur and Tengyur Collections of all the 4,600 Buddhist books in Tibetan translation which survived from ancient India. The project grants licenses to Oxford University and the Linguistic Information Research Institute of Tokyo to release its digital materials without charge to users.

The project completes input of The Great Dictionary of the Tibetan and Chinese Languages—a massive 3200-page dictionary of the Tibetan language (one of the most comprehensive Tibetan-Tibetan dictionaries ever written), including the corresponding Chinese—for researchers at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

An agreement with the Russian Academy of Sciences is established to create a joint catalog of the massive Tibetan manuscript collection at the Oriental Library of St Petersburg; a similar agreement is penned with the University of St Petersburg, and work begins, under the joint directorship of Dr. Lev Savitsky and Michael Roach, with input team of Thupten Pelgye,

Chemical Bank of New York , America’s second largest bank, donates a large quantity of older desktop computers to input centers in India by staff of the Asian Classics Institute.

Major grants secured. The project becomes one of the few research facilities to receive grants from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, for its continued preservation of the classical literature of ancient Asia. The project received its first grant from the Institute for the Advanced Studies of World Religions, for preserving important ancient Asian texts.

Agreement concluded with the National Library of Mongolia to catalog a treasure trove of an estimated 200,000 ancient Tibetan manuscripts.

Xerox Corporation selects the project as one of the three best-run of its kind in the world, and commissions a brief documentary of the Project from Walter Cronkite’s production company, to be shown during Xerox executive training. The film, “Share the Knowledge,” also receives multiple airings on The Learning Channel.

From local centers—largely staffed by Tibetan women with families – it has become the greatest percentage of the preservation project’s data, with the highest accuracy. It has also provided one of the main sources of income for the local input operators.

ACIP Release 4, entitled A Thousand Books of Wisdom, includes just that—by far the biggest leap in the project’s output to date. The project received a major anonymous grant to produce a 700-page release manual including a revolutionary method of categorizing all of ancient Tibetan literature; methods for advanced computers.

John Brady, an executive with Lillian Vernon Corporation of New York, begins a successful 20-year tenure as ACIP Executive Director. Gordon Aston, a talented Tibetologist from New Zealand, begins his now 15-year career on staff with the Project, a driving force for completing digitalization of the Kangyur and Tengyur Collections.

The project announces Release 5, which now includes 25 megabytes of data, or about 18,000 pages of ancient classics. The Great Book on the Steps of the Path (Lamrim Chenmo), written by Je Tsongkapa in 1402 and one of Tibet’s greatest books, is one of the works completed. The St Petersburg Catalog of Tibetan Literature is up to 8,000 titles on this release.

E. Gene Smith (1936-2010), veteran administrator with the Library of Congress and greatest Tibetologist of modern times, who saved tens of thousands of ancient classics, opens the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in Cambridge, MA. The project begins a fruitful long-term collaboration with TBRC, which has since scanned millions of pages and kindly made them available to the public.

The project begins active work in cataloging the extremely valuable collections of ancient texts in some 20 libraries of the ancient mountain kingdom of Ladakh. The catalog is completed by 2007, and scanning has been under way for several years.

The project opened its first Sanskrit input center, under the directorship of the talented Santosh Dwivedi, in Varanasi, India. This will allow the project to locate and preserve the original palm leaf manuscripts that provided the models for the hundreds of thousands of Tibetan sacred works.

Begins the preservation of extensive, yet endangered collections of Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts in private homes and archives, still yet to be located or identified, in the Kathmandu Valley. These treasures have been quickly disappearing due to the devastation of the 2015 earthquake and political and social instability. The project forges a partnership with the Nagarjuna Institute of Buddhist Studies in Kathmandu to collaborate on scanning and transcribing Nepal’s Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts.

The National Library of Mongolia, located in the capital of Ulaanbaataar, is the home of 41,000 volumes of Buddhist manuscripts dating back to the 15th century. The project, in agreement with the Ministry of Culture of Mongolia, re-commences digital scanning and cataloging in the library in partnership with the Buddhist Digital Resource Center and the Khyentse Foundation.

The project expands its Kerala preservation center in South India; under the directorship of Dr. N.V. Ramachandran, a passionate and lifelong scholar of India’s ancient literary traditions, the center has scanned and cataloged hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and printed books from all over South India, including large collections of Aryuvedic, Yogic, Tantric and Sanskrit Buddhist texts.

The Asian Legacy Library, a non-profit 501c3 is founded in order to preserve and safeguard the 34-year efforts of all it’s preservation partners, including ACIP. The library now holds precious literary cultural wisdom from the Himalayan and Inner Asian, South and East Asian Regions.

ALL makes major investments in technology for the digital library – cloud services for storage and global delivery, an advanced data access layer that collects and transforms cataloging, input and scanned data and a state-of-the-art web service to make available cultural resources. ALL commits itself to expanding its mission to safeguard the important collections of all cultural wisdom traditions from around the world.