Chinese Religious Text Authority 宗教書籍規範索引 – February 2024 Report

The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) 宗教書籍規範索引 <https://crta.info> is an open digital annotated catalogue, providing bibliographic and academic information about Chinese religious texts produced prior to the 1960s. Built upon MediaWiki software, it allows for collaborative work and open data sharing, includes an advanced search function, and provides its core bibliographic data in XML format. As of February 2024 it includes over 3,550 entries, each representing a unique edition of a Chinese religious manuscript or printed work.
Our goal is to map the complex territory of the Chinese religious textual world, beginning with the reprint collections recently produced in China and Taiwan, but also drawing upon digitized texts produced by libraries, as well as personal collections and research. We seek to be a resource to researchers and members of religious communities searching for reliable information on Chinese religious texts.
Our steering committee met most recently in Paris in early January as part of a broader workshop on genres and corpora in Chinese religious texts. We have received generous funding in the past from FROGBEAR (From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions), research funding from various universities, and we currently benefit from work produced as part of the ChinaText project <https://anr.fr/Project-ANR-22-FRAL-0001>, headed by Philip Clart and Vincent Goossaert, and funded by the ANR-DFG Funding Programme for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
A list of steering committee members can be found on the about page of the site <https://crta.info/wiki/crta:About>, and interested contributors are welcome to contact me for more information on contributing to the project.