Submitted by jswami on June 17, 2009 - 3:19pm
The BBT has a lot of valuable stuff—books, manuscripts, letters, photos, paintings, audio, videos, and more, some of it in the Bhaktivedanta Archives, some of it elsewhere. A lot of it is in digital form, some of it not.Following the model for an Open Archival Information System, the BBT has begun a “Digital Repository” project.
Among its purposes:
- To put all the BBT’s stuff (as far as possible) into an up-to-date digital form, with suitable “metatags” to help in finding things.
- To archive all the stuff in one digital repository—one digital “box” (of course with backups).
- To keep all of Srila Prabhupada’s books in digital files we can supply to printers for publishing or use for ebooks and other formats.
- To provide a free, open-source, up-to-date replacement for the Folio VedaBase, both online and for personal computers (Windows, Mac, Linux, and so on).
Pancharatna Dasa is coordinating the project, greatly assisted by Sarva Thulasingam, a devotee in the Seattle area who works as an engineer for Microsoft.
They have decided to host the repository using
DSpace, the open-source software platform most widely used by libraries and research institutions for purposes like ours.Here’s a diagram showing what a DSpace repository is about.
Customizing our DSpace repository for our needs and getting all the stuff into it is a big job.
Here are some of the tasks for which we could use help right now:
- uploading various kinds of content as experiments
- designing XML schema (incorporating
If you’re tech-savvy and would like to volunteer your help, please email
