Adopt an Input Center
The heart of ACIP's work happens at our input centers in India and Mongolia, where we train and employ people to digitize and preserve their rich cultural heritage. ACIP provides valuable jobs, particularly for the Tibetan refugees who have few other opportunities, with the greater goal of saving these rare and precious texts for future generations.
Please help our mission by adopting an input center. Help us keep these manuscripts free to all so the great ideas of Buddhism can proliferate through the world.
We thank you for extending your hearts to this project and to all the people and families who benefit from your pledge.
There are three levels of support:
Head of the family
Family member
Cousin
You choose the amount:
General Donations
ACIP is entirely funded by donations, and it has 501(c)3 status with the United States Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit educational organization. Worldwide, ACIP currently employs 81 men and women on a full-time basis. Because our U.S. based offices are run mostly by volunteers, over 85% of every dollar donated goes directly to our field offices throughout the world.
How to use Sharah
Sharah is a free open-source software that is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. You can click here to download the most up to date version.
And if you would like to learn how to use Sharah, you can click here to see a basic manual on how to use it, and select play below to see a little demo video of the program in action:
In-Kind Gifts
Historically, ACIP has made use of second-hand computers for our field offices, but more recently, tax laws and the lower cost of electronics in Asia have made it generally impractical for us to accept used equipment. We do however welcome donations of new or nearly new equipment, especially laptops, scanners, digital cameras for imaging texts, and storage media such as hard drives. We can also use frequent flyer miles and air tickets, for our directors to travel to input centers and supervise the startup of new operations, etc. We would also welcome the donation of office space in Tucson or New York for scanning texts to be input in Asian centers.
Sharah
The Asian Classics Input Project has entered into a big new project with TBRC - the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center - (www.tbrc.org) in which we're getting ready to create a new website which includes both TBRC scans and ACIP text for as much of the Tibetan Buddhist canon as possible.
The first step is to prepare the scans (cropping and straightening) so that they will work in the interface, called ACE (www.aciparchive.org/ace/), which our software programmer in chief, Aaron Cram created. It allows users to navigate the TBRC scans and search their content using ACIP's inputted transliterations.
This cropping and straightening is also the first step in ACIP's input process. Our input operators in southern India receive printouts of cropped and straightened scans, which they then input from.
So it is a simple, yet essential job to crop and straighten the scans. Many people have said they do it while watching a movie, or as they wind down and serve the Dharma at the end of the day.
If you think you might be interested in the near and/or distant future, please click here to fill out our volunteer application form.
If you have filled out the application form, and would like to download and/or learn the program, or else if you'd like to just see the program and how it works before filling out the application form, you can click here to visit our how to use Sharah page.
Volunteer Opportunities
We would welcome volunteers in any of the following areas:
- If you have strong Tibetan or Sanskrit skills, please help us qualify texts, comparing the input version against the scan of the original.
- If you are in New York or Tucson, or anywhere else with Tibetan or Sanskrit libraries, you could help ACIP by scanning texts, which will be sent to India for input.
- Fundraising -- please contact us if you have skills in that area, or if you know someone who would be able to help. We would also love to meet your philanthropic friends!
- Are you a software developer? We can usually find many things for a programmer to do, if you have skills in that area and would like to help.
- Cropping and straightening scans -- This is a job anybody can do, but which is a crucial part of the ACIP data workflow. We now have a department dedicated solely to managing volunteers of this kind. Click here to learn about, sign up for, and be trained in the Sharah process
