TBRC sTog and other files: PDF/TIFF

[Jonathan Silk]

Follow up:

Gene Smith has written to me as follows regarding the available file
formats for TBRC materials. Let me emphasize something here: TBRC is
a non-profit organization, into which Gene and others are pouring
their expertise and incredible energy for the sake of the broader
scholarly (and Tibetan) community. We can hardly expect them to
direct a significant portion of that energy to anything other than
the production and presentation of useable data. This is not to
negate the great value and importance of further manipulations of
that data. Perhaps, as Birgit herself has alluded to, scholars with
expertise in technical matters and the appropriate passion for this
material can approach TBRC and Gene directly with a view to their
collaboration in the development of long-term tools for the further
exploitation of the data he is so generously (and I repeat, so
cheaply) making available.

Notice in particular below the offer that for those with
institutional (or unusual personal) resources, the materials can be
made available in TIFF format. I may note that we here have been in
discussions with TBRC about acquiring the whole of the materials for
the UC Library system, in which case they are deliverable on external
hard drives (rather than CD) suitable for posting on password
protected and access restricted servers, such as those of a
university library. Especially scholars at institutions without wide
Tibetan holdings might want to seriously consider this approach.
Please contact Gene directly about this possibility--the external
drives, of which two are so far available, are priced for
institutions at $8000 each, and contain approximately 1000 texts
each. Of course, complete contents listings are available.

In any event, here is what Gene wrote me a day or so ago:

Dear Jonathan,
We do not intend to provide individual users ordering one or two CDs with
both type 4 compressing tiffs and pdf images. The pdfs are legible and can
be printed out easily.  We are not about to get into any more technical
questions regarding DjVu. If people want to order our product we provide it
as *.pdf files. For libraries and for the rare individual who might
subscribe we will provide as both. I wish we could be more accomodating.
Regards,
Gene


FYI:  email to: info at tbrc.org , or see  http://www.tbrc.org

--
Jonathan Silk
Department of Asian Languages & Cultures
Center for Buddhist Studies
UCLA
290 Royce Hall
Box 951540
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1540
phone: (310)206-8235
fax:  (310)825-8808
silk at humnet.ucla.edu