 My name is Rick Stamble, and yes, I've been a member of the Buddhist Churches of America through my affiliation with the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple since the 1980s. I now serve as the national president of the Buddhist Churches of America. We consist of over 60 temples and churches throughout the United States. I was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and after that, as a young attorney, interviewed scores of Japanese-Americans who had been incarcerated in internment camps during World War II, notwithstanding the fact they were American citizens that touched me deeply. And it was that that attracted me to learning more about Shin Buddhism and eventually becoming a member of the Buddhist Churches of America to promote the importance of the B.C.A. archives in the United States as an historical record, religiously and of the immigrant experience of the Japanese-Americans in the United States. It was about 1998 that B.C.A. entered into a partnership with the Japanese-American National Museum Janum in Los Angeles. It was there that we put our archival collection, which at the time consisted of over 350 linear feet of documents and photographs and other kinds of information. However, Janum is a relatively small private museum, and because our archive collection is, we are told, the largest collection of Japanese-American history in the United States. We were searching for a repository and a place to digitize and display our archive collection, both to scholars for research, as well as to members of the general public. And it was the mission statement of the UCLA archives and library that caught our attention to maintain in perpetuity our archive collections for use at no charge for free to scholars and researchers, academics, as well as to members of the general American public. And it was for that and other reasons that we determined as a national organization to move our entire archive collection to UCLA where it now resides. Well, I think one thing we're trying to do with this large archive of Buddhism in Los Angeles, of which this new acquisition will be an important part, we're trying to give people at UCLA and beyond really an opportunity to explore the original materials and original sources for telling the history of Buddhism in this region. And the Buddhist Churches of America in particular is one of the very earliest forms of Buddhism to make its way to the United States and the West generally and especially into the Los Angeles region. So if we're going to tell the history of Buddhism in Los Angeles, we really have to start by telling the history of the Buddhist Churches of America in Los Angeles. As a graduate student and researcher, one of the problems that I think I've run into on more than one occasion is this issue of accessibility with research materials. I've visited a number of universities here in the Southern California area and around the United States and of course abroad in places like Tokyo and Kyoto. And inevitably you run into issues where you are barred from access or storage becomes an issue in accessing the materials. And I think the idea of having the BCA collection here at UCLA and its sort of open accessibility to not only students, graduate and undergraduate and faculty here at the university but also the greater Los Angeles community is going to be one of those distinguishing factors between this collection here and other collections at other universities. It will be incredibly easy for students and the greater community to come in and for free access materials like this for independent research projects and scholarship. And I think that's one of the things that is different about this collection at UCLA. When we think about archives, I think what's really important to remember is that we often see this as sort of ephemera. These will be, you know, flyers and handouts and minutes of meetings, financial documents, pictures. When you put all these together, especially when you've collected all these materials as the Buddhist churches of America has been doing for so many decades now, these individual ephemera together become this massive original source material for helping us understand how Buddhism was able to be introduced into a new cultural region like the Americas and then how that tradition adapted to the interest of predilections and the quite unique cultural context of California. BCA is excited and looking forward to collaborating with UCLA. This is a piece of history that we think touches on many different disciplines, both religious and theological, as well as sociological, psychological and all of the attributes of people in the hundreds of thousands who have been members of the Buddhist churches of America to maintain that collection and that information for future generations.