Ven. Geshe Lhakdor, Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Visits BPL

Left to right: Mary Beth Newbill, head of BPL's Southern History Dept.; Catherine Sloss Jones, president and CEO of Sloss Real Estate Company, Inc.; Angela Fisher Hall, director of BPL; Ven. Geshe Lhakdor, director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives; Jim Baggett, head of BPL's Archives Department

During his recent trip and lecture tour to Atlanta, Birmingham, and Dallas, Ven. Geshe Lhakdor visited the special collections of the Birmingham Public Library.

Ven. Geshe Lhakdor has served the Dalai Lama as his translator and religious assistant since 1989, accompanying the Dalai Lama to conferences and forums throughout the world. He has translated books by the Dalai Lama into English and is a trustee of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility,

Jim Baggett and Geshe Lhakdor discuss items
housed in the Archives Department at BPL

director of the Central Archive of the Dalai Lama, a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montreal, Canada, and an honorary professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is now the director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and head of the Science Education Project.

At BPL, Geshe Lhakdor visited with staff and toured the Linn-Henley Research Library where he saw the original survey for the city of Birmingham and the 1963 jail docket that records the arrests of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and more than 1,000 other civil rights demonstrators. He also examined a 1665 map of India, Nepal, and Tibet from BPL’s cartographic collection. Created by the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (considered the father of Egyptology), the map was published in Amsterdam.

To learn more about the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives visit:
http://www.ltwa.net/library/.