Technology Infrastructure Grant
Published by Jeff Wallman on 10 Jun 2009
TBRC is delighted to announce that it has been awarded a generous technology infrastructure grant from the Tsadra Foundation. This grant is essential in making the full range of Tibetan literature available to all.
With this grant, TBRC has purchased 3 pieces of equipment: a planetary book scanner, a microfilm scanner and a XServe server / Promise RAID unit to fuel our website. These are installed and operational.
Book Scanner
TBRC purchased the Indus 5005C planetary book scanner. This is an exceptional piece of machinery manufactured by ImageWare in Germany and distributed here in the US by the OEM partner Indus International. We are able to scan virtually everything in the physical library from rare and fragile manuscripts and bound books to unclear xylographs. The scanner is equipped with software (BCS-2) that allows us to crop images as we scan them, plus a variety of image processing capabilities that fully leverage the powerful image capture hardware. Since the installation a few weeks ago, we have already scanned more than 30,000 pages of texts.
Microfilm Scanner
TBRC purchased the ScanPro 2000 microfilm scanner for relatively low volume microfilm digitization. We have been able to digitize film that was taken from a variety of sources and have identified rare texts that have yet been published.
Web Infrastructure
A very exciting and needed addition to our infrastructure is a new high performance web server and storage unit. The new server is a glistening dual quad core XServe from Apple with 24 GB of RAM. This machine drives a 12 TB high performance RAID storage unit from Promise Technology. TBRC now has enough computing resources for its digital library that within a few years time will total upwards of 20 million pages of texts driven by a rich encyclopedic database.
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