THE SNOW LION NEWSLETTER

Tibetan Himalayan Digital Library

The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (www.thdl.org) is an initiative creating a digital library infrastructure to support individuals, institutions, communities and projects around the world dedicated to creating, archiving and using knowledge by, about and for peoples in Tibet and the Himalayas.

The first aim of the library is to support the growth and enrichment of the academic study of Tibet and the Himalayas by encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, collaboration, active learning, and outreach to diverse audiences. The second aim is to support Tibetan and Himalayan peoples through facilitating constructive partnerships between academics and NGOs, working directly with educators in the area, facilitating the use of new technologies within the region using regional languages and perspectives, engaging in a series of projects aimed at empowering community voices at the domestic and international levels, and working in constructive ways to further diverse communal aims through the use of digital technology, education and publishing. THDL thus balances the goals of supporting, transforming and empowering Tibetan and Himalayan studies on the one hand, and Tibetan and Himalayan communities on the other hand.

THDL is open and supportive of projects from any discipline and subject-literature, geography, music, environmental studies, history, anthropology, religion, and more. In addition, it is building repositories and tools to deal with media of any type-texts, images, audio-video, immersive objects, and maps.

THDL is technically supported by the University of Virginia, but its content is developed, designed and owned by a broad array of individuals and organizations from around the world. The basic idea is that participants can save great cost and time by taking advantage of already-built tools, repositories and designs, while the public gets the advantage of a single site of diverse content which uses standard technologies and designs for complete interoperability.

The staff at THDL has just completed an initial five-year launch (2000-2004) during which they have worked out basic technical issues and designs, as well as built the necessary partnerships between academics, librarians, technologists, photographers, and others. They are now entering their second five-year period of development, focusing on content production, integration, enhanced user friendliness, and benefiting communities in Tibet and the Himalayas. While their early focus was on Tibetan culture, they now have a number of projects in the Southern Himalayas.