The visual materials featured on this website are largely drawn from a digital humanities project led by the late Professor Luis Oscar Gómez, founder of the Buddhist Studies Program at the University of Michigan. In Fall 2008, I helped Professor Gómez digitize a selection of plates from a rare book by the Dutch scholar Nicolaas Johannes Krom (1883-1945), his Beschrijving van Barabudur (“A Description of Barabudur”). Krom’s three-volume work is collected at the University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Research Center.
In 2022, the Special Collections Research Center kindly granted me permission to showcase the digitized plates from Krom’s Barabudur on this website. This gallery of plates is my way to honor the memory of Professor Gómez—a way to keep the inspiration from our short collaboration alive in my current research projects.
Ultimately, this is also a way to say a special thank you to Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Micah Auerback and Benjamin Brose at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and to the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library, for the continued support in research during the COVID-19 pandemic.