Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Pali Text Society was founded in 1881 by Thomas William Rhys Davids, a British civil servant who had served in Sri Lanka from 1864 to 1872. Rhys Davids created the society to foster the study of Pāli texts, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism.
Pāli is the language in which the scriptures of the Theravada school of Buddhism are preserved, making the Pāli Canon the oldest collection of Buddhist scriptures kept in their original written language. Carolina Foyley Rhys Davids described Pāli as the second oldest language in which East Asian religious texts were recorded, after the Vedic tradition.
The Fragile Palm Leaves project was launched by the Pali Text Society in 1994 to catalogue, preserve, and digitize Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts from Southeast Asia. It was formally incorporated as a nonprofit foundation in Thailand in 2001, and in February 2013 the society joined Sendai University and the University of Toronto to digitize Myanmar manuscript collections, now accessible through the Myanmar Manuscript Digital Library.
By 1922, when founder Thomas William Rhys Davids died, the Pali Text Society had issued 64 separate texts across 94 volumes exceeding 26,000 pages, along with articles by English and European scholars.
Carolina Augusta Foyley Rhys Davids was the wife of the society's founder and served as its president from 1922 to 1942 following his death. A scholar of Pāli and Sanskrit with a background in economics, she steered the society through financial difficulties during the Great Depression, published two editions of the Journal of the Pali Text Society, and completed translations including two volumes on the Apadāna in 1925 and 1927.
The first Pāli-English dictionary was published by Robert Caesar Childers in 1874. The Pali Text Society superseded it in 1925 with a new dictionary compiled over roughly 40 years by T. W. Rhys Davids and completed by his student William Stede. A third dictionary by Margaret Cone, with the first of three volumes covering A through Kh, was published in 2001.