The Buddhist Canons Research Database is a resource that offers complete bibliographic information (with internal crosslinks and links to external resources) for the roughly 5,000 texts contained in the Tibetan Buddhist canon, and offers both general and targeted full text search access to those texts (approximately 15 million syllables).

BCRD is a joint project of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies (AIBS) and the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies (CCBS).

The Buddhist Canons Research Database was first developed as a private reference tool in 1994 as a loose combination of existing bibliographies and reference resources. In 1999, a custom search-and-retrieval search engine was built specifically for Tibetan language data, incorporating fuzzy-matching, stemming, and part-of-speech identification in support of corpus-based linguistic research for Tibetan.

In 2010, the basic bibliographic database was first deployed (as a public beta) as an online resource to enable the research community to document and track editions and translations of texts in the Buddhist canon — beginning with Tibetan canonical works collected in the Kangyur (bka 'gyur) and Tengyur (bstan 'gyur). Designed to facilitate research in canonical materials, related texts in the two halves of the canon and in the bibliography of secondary literature in world languages were cross-linked to allow for rapid accessing of information, including direct links to page images (hosted by TBRC) and e-text (hosted by ACIP) as well as documentation and links to parallel e-texts in Sanskrit and Chinese.

In 2011, in an attempt to support the larger goal of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies (AIBS) of promoting translation and research in Buddhist Studies worldwide, the interface to the database was redesigned for localization in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Tibetan, Japanese, and Chinese). In addition, as one of the key strengths of the Tibetan literature lies in its thousand year commentarial tradition on the Buddhist canon, select authors and textual collections were added to the database as well, providing direct links to Tibetan-authored commentaries on canonical works. This remains an ongoing augmentation of the research database.

In 2013, the BCRD was formally launched with a redesigned interface, and full-text searching of the Kangyur and Tengyur — either as a whole or specifically within an individual text — was added, complete with page-by-page reference information and links to available e-text (again hosted by ACIP) and partial lexical information automatically provided through the use of techniques of Natural Language Processing. This, too, remains an ongoing development of the database. A detailed presentation of the latest features was given by Paul Hackett at the Thirteenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS-XIII), Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, July 2013, and at the "Humanities Studies in the Digital Age and the Role of Buddhist Studies" conference at the University of Tōkyō, November, 2013.