Talk:Osho Books on CD-ROM: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 01:37, 7 September 2014

The Osho Books Database, as it is called widely on the net, is pretty much the most stupendous and awesome tool for finding specific words of Osho's there is and ever has been. Even now (2014), more than twenty years old, it still cannot be beat, though various forces are chipping away at it. Herewith a brief history and overview of its features and limitations.

History

In the beginning was the word. And the word was ... Oops, wrong liturgy! In the beginning was the Silver Platter, as it was first known. Emerging digital technologies were opening up an amazing array of possibilities, which dovetailed nicely with the need to "organize" Osho's words and make them more accessible than ever. And so it came to pass that all of Osho's English books were scanned and the images read and "translated" with new, primitive but adequate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software into editable text.
And this text could be put into one giant file, 100MB for 305 books, in which word searches could be carried out. And for such giant files, a special kind of search was needed, and so one came along to fill the bill. Folio VIP developed a kind of search that still has no equal, with tools that would allow finding words in proximity to each other and much much more. Subjects, themes, specific quotes, jokes, all findable in that mountain of books. Now it was "Osho's Books on CD-ROM."
A CD-ROM is of course just a generic device, but for sannyasins with access to it, this was THE CD-ROM, needing no qualifying or descriptive terms. Access was restricted to certain workers for some years but its desirability was immense and it was inevitable that copies started leaking out. Soon copies of copies spread far and wide and it was not long before they were being shared on the net. Disconnected from its physical body, a disc, it finally became known as the Osho Books Database, or just the Database.

Features

Besides the variety of tools to refine searches, there is a very good help section dealing with how to apply the tools specifically to Osho's words, and a well-organized set of appendices to assist in that application. Outside of their uses ancillary to the search tools, the appendices can be used directly by researchers as sources of information. One sample appendix is reproduced in the discussion page for this article.
Another feature of the Database is its treasure trove of unpublished books. These are books whose text has been through a rough edit but never went further than that to actual publication. There are sixteen such Darshan Diaries, six volumes of Last Testaments and a few other books, most of which will likely never be published. Thus the Database is the only form in which this significant portion of Osho's books is available anywhere.
Ah, this!

Limitations

One obvious limitation is that it is only useful for searches in English. A Hindi equivalent may eventually happen but would require everything to be done more or less from scratch, both scanning and software. A related limitation in the English Database is that many titles have been translated from Hindi since the early 90s but have not been added.
And there are these technical limitations: From the very beginning, this marvel has only been available for computers using Windows, or with such shoehorn apps as allow Windows to run on Macs and other OS's. A more serious limitation has developed in the last five or so years whereby the newer versions of Windows will not run the Database at all. Win 7 32-bit and older will, Win 7 64-bit and newer will not. Is the Database on its way to the scrapheap of history?
Negatory. There are signs that help is on the way. There are currents flowing. As before, it is too big to contain or stop, but the exact nature of the help that is being and will be developed to bring it back into use and accessibility by newer computers is not known. Stay tuned, and don't throw out those older machines just yet!
And with the technical fixes / updates, who knows?, may come content updates, all the new Hindi translations and ... well, that OCR was never perfect, so there are more than a few typo-type mistakes to clean up. Lots to do on the never-ending journey to perfection!