In honor of Tibet Week the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) would like to highlight our ongoing partnership with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharmsala, India.
The LTWA received a Mellon Foundation grant to support the preservation, digitization, and online publication of the 2,349 most fragile and rare titles, bundled into manuscripts, comprising all of the handwritten manuscripts from their collection of over 30,000 titles. Since 2017, ECDS has partnered with the LTWA to help develop their digitization workflow. We are now working to help share these digitized rare volumes as an open access online archive for teaching and research. This partnership supports the goals of the LTWA:
The primary objectives of the LTWA are to provide comprehensive Tibetan cultural resources and to promote an environment that encourages research and an exchange of knowledge between scholars and students (LTWA).
ECDS is currently building an online collection of these digitized volumes, Works from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, on its open source software platform Readux. ECDS plans to continue this collaboration as the LTWA works to digitize more titles.
Readux provides a web-based space for the Emory community and general public to engage with digitized open-source print materials. Readux acts as a digital reading room where you can browse, search, and take notes in rare materials, then click a button to create a website with your personalized edition for personal and professional scholarly use.
The Works from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives collection exemplifies ECDS’s approach to forging partnerships using Readux to foster engagement with thematic collections of digitized print materials. Readux will help meet the LTWA’s goal of encouraging the exchange of knowledge around these rare materials by making them accessible around the world and supporting their annotation through Readux’s digital note-taking feature.
We invite the Emory public to explore the manuscripts in Works from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives as we continue to add to the collection!