Introduction to THDL Community

The Community section of THDL offers open services to promote communication and coordination in the entire field of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. It is open to anyone; participation is in no way limited to participation in other areas of THDL. It is an outgrowth of the University of Virginia Library's Information Community initiative, with which it will ultimately be integrated. These services consist of four major components:

Community thus offers a digital portal to articulate, support and integrate the multiple communities of agents involved with the creation, production, and dissemination of knowledge of any type about Tibet and the Himalayas. The digital library is centrally about people, collections and tools, which together constitute an information community bound together by a common concern for knowledge on a particular subject. The term "Information Community" represents our vision, partially utopian and partially pragmatic, of communities organized around knowledge, and knowledge organized around communities. We are beset by the multiple fragmentations which currently govern both the diverse types of agents of knowledge - fieldworkers, media specialists, technicians, scholars, editors, publishers, distributors, librarians, readers, and others - and the diverse types of domains of knowledge - disciplinary, cultural, linguistic, national, specialized, popular, and others. This fragmentation damages the quality and type of knowledge produced in contemporary times, as well as renders the creators and distributors of knowledge unresponsive to the multiple communities to which they are morally and practically obligated. New Web technologies enable us to uniquely meet these challenges in order to simultaneously enhance knowledge and community, thereby maintaining intellectual and moral. An intelligent and sustained use of these technologies allows us to usher in a new era of knowledge that is profoundly interdisciplinary and collaborative in character, as well as providing unprecedented access.

We aim to promote communication, mutual support networks, and long term integration between distinct projects and organizations of diverse types and national bases. We are committed to the deep interrelation of knowledge and community at all levels, and in particular to the balance between the international and the local in knowledge, community and their integration. Given that our chosen field of endeavor is a particular region of the world, we are also particularly concerned to help empower residents of that region as agents of knowledge in the fullest sense both in the creation and utilization of knowledge.

Goal: Open Archives, Community Responsibility and Collaboration

The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library can also described in its social context as an information community, which expresses its strong commitment to being first and foremost about the intersection of communities and forms of knowledge. The collection and preservation of knowledge — the traditional domain of libraries — is thus perfectly balanced by the building and support of the multiple communities generating, sustaining and using these forms of knowledge. We believe in a better world, and in the urgent necessity of individuals and institutions to commit to concrete practices to render such visions of possibilities into realities. In particular, we believe promoting knowledge as the center for communal organization and relationships across communities is of vital importance if we are to overcome or at least complement alternative foundations, such as economic self-interest, military aggression, and other factors. In the present context, three specific commitments constitute the core of what we see as our contribution:

To express this centrality of Community on an international scale to our vision and practice in the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, we have made Community the central of the five domains that constitute its branches. Knowledge radiates out of, and is grounded within, specific human communities. Community in this specific sense as the central THDL domains consists of four chief aspects:

  1. Rosters of persons and organizations
  2. Communication means
  3. Open archive metadata and interoperability initiative
  4. Open source software clearing house.

(i) The most basic facet of the community section of THDL is the rosters of participants and organizations in the field. These rosters give people, organizations and projects the ability to online post their own entries using standard templates, and then use passworded Web-access to revise and enhance these over time. This allows community participants to advertise their work, and also gives users a searchable way to find out who is doing what in the field, thereby locating potential partners and resources. It thus provides a convenient one-stop location to learn more about people cited, project directors, organizations and so forth working throughout Tibet and the Himalayas.

(ii) In addition to an index of who's who in the community, we also provide the means for community members to communicate with each other through discussion forums, email lists and chat facilities. The chat facilities (not yet implemented) will support open chatting as well as e-conferencing. We are also looking into the possibility of adding multi-lingual functionality to all communication facilities so that Tibetan and Nepali scripts can be used directly.

(iii) In carrying out these commitments to openness, community and collaboration, THDL is committed to a dual track of operating as an open archive clearing house for resources on Tibet and the Himalayas, and in functioning as an international collaborative network of institutions and individuals whom cooperatively run THDL itself as an integrated builder of content and tools for knowledge of Tibet and the Himalayas. The open archive function is what the Community domain is dedicated to, beginning with the simple offering of rosters and documenting with thematic, annotated bibliographies links to evolving Web resources in the area across the world. Following the basic ideology of the Open Archives Initiative (OPI), THDL hopes to function as an Open Archives for Tibetan and Himalayan Studies (OATHS) such that searches are enabled across diverse projects and resources by simple adherence to basic metadata standards and/or search protocols. This resembles a type of enhanced GOOGLE of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies which at one end enables easy harvesting of data across many projects simultaneously, and at the other end eventually allow for deep level interoperability between these different projects. Thus we hope to galvanize the efforts of academics (scholars and librarians) — whose very job concerns the collection and maintenance of knowledge — to work together on helping building and maintain these indices. Eventually, it will provide indexing and documentation of print resources, multimedia resources, digital resources, and Web resources with in integrated mechanism. It will allow users from around the world to act as selectors for thematic components of the database. Hand in hand with this is the generation of bibliographical essays that provide overviews, introductions and modest histories of various areas of Tibetan and Himalayan studies over the past several centuries. We will need to rely upon external scholars to do this, and thus we can focus simply on providing a database for their storage and delivery that allows these scholars to work from remote locations with a minimum of manual processing here. In these capacities it will provide an integrated, dense resource that serves as vast, sprawling and yet highly organized means of locating knowledge in all forms about, and from, the Tibet and the Himalayas. In this way, THDL offers centralized and distributed access to information from outside of its own resources.

In addition, we promote simple, open standards to allow easy searching across diverse Web projects and hope to eventually move towards more complex mechanisms for enabling interoperability across these projects. A central aim of our Community domain is promoting interoperability across resources within and without THDL, beginning with promotion of simple metadata standards allowing for searching and harvesting across projects. The broader aims at creating a community "name server" to enable robust and persistent cross-referencing between online projects.

Beyond this function, THDL in its own collections across the four domains (collections, reference, education and tools) offers tightly integrated standards to build content in a wide range of diverse projects, each credited to, and maintained by, diverse individuals and institutions. These projects and resources are all characterized by perfect interoperability within THDL, and hence powerful integration and utility. The participants are, collectively, the actual directors and owners of THDL in and of itself.

(iv) The open source movement entails making one's software available in its "source code", i.e. the underlying building blocks, for others to develop further, use in parts within their own projects and in general do what they will. The expectation is that in this creative ferment a broader communal synergy emerges which enables individuals, projects and communities with limited resources to still find technical support for their activities and goals. It also makes projects sustainable and recyclable, since their base of support and use is far broader than their own narrow self-definition. Closely linked to the open source movement is the free software movement, which is committed to making high quality and flexible software available freely to the public. THDL is completely committed to this, and makes all its tools available for free use by the public, and as open source to be worked on and used by developers around the world. See Sourceforge.net, one of the world's largest Open Source software archives, for direct access to source code of many of our projects — see the projects THDL Tools (Tibetan and Himalayan DL) and Tools for Field Linguistics.

The University of Virginia Library's Information Community initiative and its relation to THDL

The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library is built around the Information Community initiative sponsored by the University of Virginia Library. The Tibetan and Himalayan Information Community offers a communication hub open to all individuals, institutions and projects for use in publicizing their work and communicating with each other. It also operates as central nexus for the general public to find information about creators and products of knowledge from all perspectives about Tibet and the Himalayas. Access to the postings and resources within the Information Community is completely open to all, while participation is open to all individuals, institutions and projects with a serious involvement and commitment to knowledge in and about the region.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library itself overall is an extension of the notion of the Information Community, a notion similar to what other have called an information ecology. Around the open core of the Information Community, the Digital Library is building a comprehensive collaborative environment for research and publication of a broad range of types of media in diverse disciplines. Its technical infrastructure is hosted by the University of Virginia's Library and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities as a nexus for an international team of technologists, while its content is operated and owned by an international consortium of universities, libraries, museums and individuals. All participants adhere to the technical and metadata standards of the digital library, but are entirely responsible for the content of their own projects. Central collaborative resources within the Library function as integrated bases for a broad diversity of projects, such that users can consult individual projects as well as integrated and searchable repositories integrating multiple projects. The Digital Library consists of four domains — Collections, Reference, Tools and Education — organized as an integrated yet diverse mandala around the central nexus of an open Community center.

THDL in its four domains is thus wide ranging consortium, but participation entails commitment to active collaboration based upon shared standards and technical integration, unlike the completely open space of the Information Community around which it is built. We do have long term plans to build further bridges between the THDL surrounding collaborative domains of Collections, Reference, Tools and Education, and the open center of the Information Community Center, but we welcome such bridges and use of the Community center by other projects as well. Beginning with some of the major digital projects in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, we would are slowly working towards a type of communal name server hosted by the Tibetan and Himalayan Information Community which the Digital Library and other projects can participate in to create basic levels of interoperability across the community. In this way, we hope that in the future users will increasingly be able to consult international digital resources on Tibet and the Himalayas in integrated and synergistic ways.