Tizra software bringing Einstein papers online

PUBLISHING HOUSE: Abe Dane, left, chief operating officer at Tizra, with company CEO David Durand. The firm’s platform is being utilized for the digital publishing of “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.” / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
PUBLISHING HOUSE: Abe Dane, left, chief operating officer at Tizra, with company CEO David Durand. The firm’s platform is being utilized for the digital publishing of “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.” / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

One of the most ambitious and visible publishing projects to document the history of science, “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein,” will go online with a digital publishing platform created by Providence-based Tizra.
“It’s a project being done by Princeton University Press and that’s what people will see, but behind the scenes, the Tizra platform is what they’re using to achieve their mission to disseminate the information,” said Tizra President and Chief Operating Officer Abe Dane.
Seven-year-old Tizra develops digital-publishing software used by publishers to create digital products, including e-books, periodicals, newsletters, research reports and educational materials. The company has earned a prestigious roster of clients, including Stanford University’s HighWire Press, Columbia University Press and MIT Press.
“We looked at a range of options and Tizra’s was the best fit,” said Princeton University Press Digital Production Manager Kenneth Reed. “We determined Tizra was the right partner because of its highly flexible, open and intuitive content-delivery approach and a strong reputation for reliability.”
About 14,000 papers selected from all phases of Einstein’s career are expected to fill nearly 30 volumes being published by Princeton University Press. Thirteen volumes have been printed so far, with the 14th due out in late 2014, said Reed.
The Einstein volumes will be available to the public and Tizra is bringing those volumes online.
The papers range from Einstein’s first work on the special and general theories of relativity and the origins of the quantum theory, to expressions of profound concern with civil liberties, education, Zionism, pacifism and disarmament. Einstein’s original papers are archived at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is sponsoring the project, said Reed.
“One of the reasons we chose Tizra is that we want to preserve the look and feel of the volumes. You’ll see the pages as they appear in the print volumes,” said Reed. “That’s very important because of the complex content with the equations and physics that are in the volumes.”
The Einstein papers will be a destination for researchers and language is critical in the mission to bring the volumes into digital form.
“Every document in ‘The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein’ appears in the language in which it was written and the majority of documents authored by Einstein are in German,” said Reed. “Each volume has the document edition in which the original language appears and a supplementary English translation for select, previously untranslated documents.
“Tizra uses a powerful open-source search engine that has a German-language extension to allow for searching across the texts in German,” said Reed. “That was certainly a key point in our decision-making in selecting Tizra.
“In addition to linking between the German documents and the English translations within the volumes, we will also be looking at linking to the public archival database, which is the Einstein Archives Online, a joint project of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology,” said Reed.
Tizra CEO and Chief Technology Officer David Durand has long been working with scholarly materials and has had experience with multilanguage projects.
Durand graduated from Brown University with a major in computer science in 1983 and earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Boston University in 2000. One previous project Durand worked on was Access Science, an extensive collection of scientific information brought online from McGraw-Hill’s “Encyclopedia of Science & Technology.” Bringing together valuable information from the history of science with the Einstein project is very much about the future.
“One of the biggest parts of working with Tizra is that that they’ve built the right forward-thinking technology,” said Reed. “We’re planning to make the project available indefinitely.”
Said Dane, “That’s part of our software-as-a-service approach. They’re not just buying a piece of software that they have to keep upgrading or adding patches over time. They’re buying access to the software we maintain. We’re constantly working to upgrade our software and they always have access to the latest version.”
Those continuous efforts resulted in another major project that began before the Einstein papers. That was the partnership with Stanford University Press, a leading e-publishing platform for scholarly publishers, which is collaborating with Tizra to add e-books.
For Tizra, the natural workflow is to keep developing and improving its digital-publishing platform, partly funded by Rhode Island’s Slater Technology Fund.
Rhode Island plays a critical role in nourishing Tizra’s growth, said Dane.
“After spending 12 years of my career in New York, one of the publishing centers of this country, I came to Rhode Island to work and was amazed at the level of talent here,” said Dane. “Now I like to think of Providence as becoming [an] online publishing center.” •

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