Emory Tibet Digital Library
The Emory Tibet Digital Library began in November 2005 with the
acquisition of the first two Pecha Collections (about
2000 volumes) from the Tibetan
Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC). The pechas are Tibetan texts in a traditional
woodblock print format.
Wood blocks are carved backwards by craftsmen. See images of the process as
it is still done at the Derge
Publishing House via the Tibetan
Himalayan Digital Library site at the University of Virginia.
The TBRC was founded by Gene Smith to
digitize these texts, especially those whose preservation in Tibetan monasteries
is no longer possible. The value of this literature, as Smith says in his mission
statement,
is that "it includes not only the Tibetans' original contributions but also
the traditional works of the great Indian scholars and masters, which were
systematically documented and preserved in Tibet. Tibet's extensive literature
contains fully developed branches of knowledge that covers everything from
philosophy, medicine, art, psychology, astrology, and mathematics to alchemy,
poetics, and history."
Professors John
Dunne and Sara
McClintock were instrumental in arranging for this acquisition. Kyle
Fenton of the Digital Library team in Woodruff Library arranged for
the mounting of the digital texts on to a web server. Tim
Bryson of the Collection Management team in Woodruff Library is responsible
for coordination and maintenance of the site. A copy of each collection as
it is acquired is sent to the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in
Dharamsala, India, as part of the Emory
Tibet Partnership.
- About the Pecha Collections
- TBRC's digital library when complete will total about 12 collections
of 1,000 volumes each. As of 2007-2008, Emory has acquired access to
all five core text collections currently available.
- Most titles are collections of works by a single author in multiple
volumes. So, for example, the annotated list for a collection may consist
of 200 titles but the links lead to about 1000 volumes. In some
cases, a volume may contain hundreds of distinct works by multiple authors.
- How to use the Pecha Collections
- In most cases, you have the choice to view each title either on
the TBRC site or on the Emory site. The TBRC site offers the advantages
of their full and rich metadata with accompanying search capabilities.
The Emory site may in some cases offer quicker access to the texts once
you've identified which one you want.
- At the top of the home page for the Pecha collections
are links to manifests (lists) of the titles accompanied by descriptions
of their contents and corresponding links to the digitized texts.
- Displayed on the first row are links to the TBRC site's annotated lists
for each collection which, in turn, will display links for each title
back to the Emory copies of the texts as well as to the TBRC copy
of each text. Note: you need to install the localizer
script for
the Emory links to be displayed on the TBRC site. When you click on a
title, you open a web page that will have a link back to the Emory copy
of the text (click on the phrase "Available in Emory Tibet Digital
Library Library!") and also a link to the
TBRC copy of the text (click the "View Digital Text" link).
Sometimes one link is faster than the other.
- Below the links to the TBRC site are local Emory manifests for collections
1 and 2, reflecting an earlier phase of the project and currently serving
as a back-up to the TBRC site for those collections.
- To render the Tibetan fonts correctly, install the Tibetan
Machine Web font family.
- Using the Emory copies of digitized texts
- Clicking on the "Available in Emory" link takes you
to an index page of the digitized texts at Emory. The index page
has a link back to the Pecha collections home page ("parent
directory"),
a link to pdf images of each volume ("ebooks") and
a link to tiff images of the same texts ("images").
The ebooks pdf files are most useful for practical purposes because
they are both readable and smaller in file size.
- Clicking on the "ebooks" link takes you to a list
of all the volumes for a particular
title. The numbers in the links reference the title work number
and the volume number. The default sort order is by these numbers.
Clicking on the "Size" header will re-sort the list by size.
- Each volume link takes you to one pdf file containing all
the pages of that volume.
- You can use Acrobat
Pro to print three or four pdf pages on
one sheet, e.g., go to the Print Dialog then to Page Scaling
then to Multipage/sheet then to Custom then select 1x4. Third
party Acrobat plug-ins like Quite
Imposing allow you to manipulate printing
with even greater flexibility.
- Using the local "manifest" or index for collections 1 and 2.
- Texts are grouped by genre or tradition which are hyperlinked in
a table at the top of the page.
- Use the table at the top to navigate to a genre or use your web
browser's find function to locate a specific title.
- The title links are labelled with TBRC work numbers (all start
with the letter W) and the numbers following the work number refer
to the volumes of that title.
- The LCCN number refers to the Library of Congress catalog number
for the corresponding print text, if available, and can be used to
locate easily the standard catalog record in the Library of Congress
catalog or the WorldCat union
catalog. Summary records can also be found in EUCLID using the keyword
phrase
"Research
library of scanned Tibetan literature."
Localizer Script
Emory Libraries has created a browser
extension for Firefox which runs on the TBRC site whenever a list of
titles is displayed. It determines which of the titles Emory has digital
copies of and provides a link to them.
Related Emory sites
Related non-Emory sites
