The extensive Tibetan literature in American collections was collected over the past century and a half by explorers, missionaries, diplomats, and scholars. Because Tibetan literature was largely copied and published in woodblock prints and loose-leaf collections, many of the texts are incomplete. Pages of a single manuscript volume may be found in several libraries, for example at Yale and in Newark Museum. By cataloging these collections, TBRC hopes to recompile these collections using the facilities of the web. The Works at the Library of Congress, comprising more than 3,000 volumes came to into the collections from the consul William Woodville Rockhill, Berthold Laufer, Joseph Rock, Matthew Kapstein, and Tshering Thar during the period 1899-1996. In addition, there are miscellaneous purchases and gifts. The content of these Works are little known because of their relative obscurity inside the Library of Congress. The subjects covered include philosophy, medicine, art, psychology, alchemy, astrology, poetics, and history and include rare and important examples that should ideally be incorporated into the larger digital library TBRC is developing.

The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is one of the pre-eminent natural history institutions in the world, a leader in scientific research and a pioneer in museum exhibition and education in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, geology, paleontology and zoology. The text and image archives in the Library document the professional work of distinguished scientists like Franz Boas, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Margaret Mead and Ernst Mayr, naturalists like Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs, and extraordinary, yet still not widely known, artists like Carl Akeley and Charles Knight. They tell stories of field and lab work to develop collections, exhibitions and educational programs as exploration led to the study of new places, other peoples and countless animal species. Created from the mid 19th to the early 21st centuries, the content of the collections begins in geological time and continues to the present. Scholars and writers research the archival collections for publication in theses, dissertations, scholarly journals, magazines, trade and children’s books; filmmakers gather material for documentaries and TV productions; and artists, in growing numbers, reference it as a resource and inspiration for their work. The number of archival researchers has tripled over the past ten years reflecting the growing importance and relevance of natural science research and exploration and their fascinating history.