Asian Classics News and Information

Update on the MONGOLIA NATIONAL LIBRARY Project

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen Hedrick) — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:50:00 +0000

Thank you so much for your support for Asian Classics Input Project.

We wanted to share with you a quick update our Mongolia Library Project. ACIP is in the process of deploying a new version of our software to catalog and digitize what is one of the single largest repository of Tibetan literature on the planet. Below are a few pictures from this this last as well as a prior trip. We are very excited about the work being done there and we could do not do this without your support.

Happy New Year From Our Family to Yours

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen Hedrick) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 18:56:00 +0000

On behalf of the entire Asian Classics Input Project family, I would like to thank you for your kind and generous donation this past year to our efforts in preserving the ancient wisdom of Tibet and South Asia.

As you may know, this is our 25^th year of operation. We are so fortunate to have had donors throughout the world, just like yourselves, taking the initiative to support our operators, their families, and the cultural heritage they represent.

With your help, we are accomplishing the goal of providing more and more of these precious texts to the world for free!

Stay tuned for future updates in 2013 on the ACIP family of donors, volunteers, and staff.

Updates from our Varanasi office Input Center

noreply@blogger.com (Kathleen Hedrick) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 13:48:00 +0000

Thank you so much for your interest in the Asian Classics Input Project. I thought it might be nice to share with you a picture of some of our staff hard at work. These pictures are from our Varanasi Office. They work 5 to 6 days a week. At this office we have a mother daughter team, the project continues to the next generation which I find very exciting and hope that you do too. They are pictured here in the center.

Stay tuned for further updates and thank you again for your support.

New ACIP website, etext, blog, and more!

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Dunbar) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:32:00 +0000

We're very happy to announce the new ACIP website.

After our server crashed last year taking our website with it, we found ourselves with a necessity to build a new site, and an adventitious catalyst to develop it as the website we've always wanted.

Today we're very pleased to launch the beginnings of that site, and with it a complete distribution of the long awaited Kangyur(བཀའ་འགྱུར་) and Tengyur(བསྟན་འགྱུར་) etext collections in Tibetan unicode script with XML markup. The Kangyur etext has been typed from the Hlasa(ལྷ་ས་) edition, while the Tengyur has been typed from the Dege(སྡེ་དགེ་) edition. Both can be found at our online etext page.

Our shift to Tibetan unicode etext in XML markup for this release of the Kangyur and Tengyur is the first step towards modernizing ACIP beyond the increasingly out of date encoding and markup paradigms we've used till now. We now feel confident that Tibetan unicode script is sufficiently supported by modern operating systems and browsers, that we can step away from the characteristic ACIP transliteration scheme, and into a world of digital Tibetan script.

Another thing we're stepping away from is what Jeff Wallman of TBRC aptly dubbed the "ACIP markup system" which we had until now used to indicate page breaks, small letters (ཡིག་ཆུང་), spelling errors etc. using the familiar @, ( ), and [ ] characters. Since the invention of the ACIP markup system, the XML markup system has become so widely supported by the various web browsers, and text editing softwares that we have now shifted to it almost out of necessity.

We had long talked about this shift, but it wasn't until discussions with TBRC in 2010 regarding a collaborative effort to present in parallel the ACIP etext, TBRC ocr text, and TBRC & ACIP scans that we together defined a standard XML schema for Tibetan etext. Unfortunately the collaborative effort lost traction with the passing of good Gene Smith, but as a legacy we have kept the schema with a few modifications necessary for the idiosyncrasies of Tibetan loose leaf pecha (དཔེ་ཆ་).

One last new and exciting feature we've developed and we're planning to expand even further is the ability to provide citations both to a specific title, and within a specific title. Details for how you can do this can be found in the usage section of our online etext page.

Of course if you're reading this you already know about our new blog, and we hope you'll subscribe either to our rss feed, or to our facebook updates.

Happy new years!