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Tibetan Buddhism : Tips for finding books in UW-Madison Catalog

This guide contains resources on Tibetan Buddhism at UW-Madison and elsewhere in the world.

Subject Heading

Often the most efficient way to search in the online catalog is by the subject heading assigned by the Library of Congress. Subject Headings can save your time by limiting items to those that are right on your topic. 

Subject Headings are a set of terms or phrases that classify materials. They describes the key topics or the "aboutness" of the item. Some major subject headings on Tibetan Buddhism are: 

Getting Started

Catalog:

The first step in finding any items on Tibetan Buddhism at UW-Madison is to search in the UW-Madison Library Catalog. All items ranging from the Buddhist cannon to modern Tibetan literature are cataloged in UW-Madison Catalog system. 

To find books beyond the UW-Madison.

WorldCat, also known as OCLC, is a global catalog of library collections. Worldcat lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the country. WorldCat is useful for discovering what other libraries might own and then to make an ILL request to retrieve the item. 

For general searching :

  • Be knowledgeable about the sources you should be searching
  • Narrow your search strategies 
  • Find with title, author 
  • Combine keyword searching with controlled vocabularies and subject headings 

Romanized Tibetan

At present, the UW-Madison Catalog is unable to display Tibetan script and so you must search with romanized Tibetan script. There are few ways to transliterate or romanize the Tibetan script, but most libraries (including UW-Madison) use the Library of Congress' Transliteration system. The ALA/LC Transliteration Tables are specific systems for converting from a non-roman script to a romanized one and it is very similar to the Wylie system which is widely used by scholars. 

Call Number

Each book in the library has a unique call number. A call number is like an address which tells us where the book is located in the library. 

Since books are classified and arranged by subject, you can often find other helpful books on the same shelf, or nearby. You can find any books specifically on Buddhism under BQ. 

BQ 1-9800 Buddhism 

BQ 1-10 Periodicals. Yearbooks (General)

BQ128-Encyclopedias

BQ 130 Dictionaries

BQ 133 Terminiology 

BQ251-799 History 

BQ1001-1045 Buddhist Literature 

BQ7530-7950 Tibetan Buddhism 

BQ7300-7529 Mahayana Buddhism