PRESERVATION
Every preservation project is unique in that it represents a distinct cultural identity that needs to be understood and honored.
MORE THAN JUST A REPOSITORY, ALL STRIVES TO KEEP THE WISDOM TRADITIONS OF ASIA VITAL IN THE WORLD.
Digital preservation has a significant impact. At its heart, digitizing literature and making it widely available creates the conditions for cultural regeneration. This allows local cultures to have renewed access to their own traditions, which allows them to engage and sustain those traditions for the future. Contact with the wider community, beyond the local culture, creates the opportunity for broad inter-cultural dialogue through translation and adaptive reuse of the traditional texts.
A clear example is how the traditions of India were preserved and practiced in Tibet for a thousand years. Preserving the Tibetan corpus has created the conditions for Tibetan traditions to be sustained, and the translation and adaptive reuse of the source texts has had an enormous impact on global culture.
We believe a world-class library should be a direct reflection of the exquisite nature of the content we preserve.
Every step of our process, from locating these precious documents, to protecting them in our digital library, is done with the same level of focus, precision, and expertise that was used during their creation centuries ago.
The discovered texts are painstakingly cataloged to ensure they are properly identified. After cataloging, the texts are scanned using the finest quality digital equipment. The scanning process then produces image files which are carefully input—the laborious process of keying in, character-by-character, the content of works. The input process makes the texts searchable so that researchers, scholars, and translators can search the content of works, locating phrases, terms, people, and places. Catalogues, scans, and inputted texts are then archived in our digital library for long-term safeguarding and access.