Here are a couple of obituaries - from The Economist and The Daily Telegraph, for Gene Smith, a librarian whose passion, intellect, tenacity and enterprise "almost single-handedly ensured the survival of Tibetan literature..." He died in December 2010.
From The Economist obituary :
"Over five decades, Mr Smith made it his business to put Tibetan literature back together. He did it more or less single-handedly, fired by his love of the language and the culture and aided by a brain that rapidly became an encyclopedia of lineages, sutras, lives of lamas, and the history and ownership of every book he came across. Expatiating in serene but fearsome detail to friends in his rooms in Delhi, or Boston, or New York, all of them piled floor-to-ceiling with cloth-wrapped pecha, he could instantly find a page anywhere to illustrate a point.
Though people considered him a teacher, he was always a librarian, with a librarian’s love of catalogues and connections; but his Buddhism added to that a reverence for the transmission of texts, on which all spiritual progress rested."
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