The first ACIP data entry centers were set up in traditional Tibetan monastic universities in South India, where courageous survivors of the invasion of Tibet, teachers and students, worked to rebuild their great institutions of learning, far from their native land. ACIP approached the heads of these institutions and together with them designed a program where young people who were not doing very well in the traditional course of study could be given a chance to learn to use computers to help preserve the great books of their own culture.
Within a few years, a number of centers were up and running in several of the great monastic universities in South India. Soon the trainees were touch-typing over fifty words a minute, and were inputting thousands of pages of ancient woodblock prints every year. Participating students are paid for both their training, and later their actual input work. We estimate that over 800 Tibetan refugees are fed primarily through the work done for ACIP.
As the input centers in the traditional monastic colleges flourished, ACIP received requests from other refugee communities throughout South Asia, seeking to set up their own input centers. At the Rabling Tibetan Refugee Camp in Hunsur, South India, the local representative of the Tibetan refugee government and ACIP designed a program that has become the model for others throughout the area. The local refugee settlement office took responsibility to locate and procure a suitable site on which to build a new input center, and the cost of the building was donated by His Holiness's refugee council. ACIP agreed to supply all the computers, to pay training and input salaries for a specified period, and provide specialists to teach touch-typing, software use, and elementary hardware repair. The Hunsur center is now one of ACIP’s most productive centers, staffed almost entirely by members of refugee farming families who use their salaries to supplement their income.
A number of graduates of ACIP training centers have used their knowledge to obtain work in related fields, to start their own businesses, or even to do entry and cataloging work for institutions like the United States Library of Congress office in India. Young people who touched their first computer at an ACIP center in India are now directing international projects such as the St. Petersburg Cataloging Project at the Library of the Institute of Oriental Studies, a collaboration with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Over a dozen ACIP input centers are now operating around the world. ACIP has sought to assure that it provides an equal opportunity for men and women as it sets up its input centers. A number of women have held supervisory and management positions, for example Ms. Sonam Hlamo, who serves as our general manager in India.
