Guide to THDL Resources
THDL's structure has been built to accommodate a vast array of collaborative resources and individual projects within a classical design of collections, reference resources, tools and education. Thus, at any given point, some resources are well developed, while others remain largely offline, or even still within design phases. This section provides users with a survey of extant resources, including brief descriptions and direct links. In addition, the descriptions outline short term development plans for those resources and what users can expect over the coming months. The Library overall is currently in a phase of normalization, as we try to streamline its presentation to focus on extant resources and make it more user friendly. We encourage you to contact us if you are curious about the state of a given component or project as well as our plans for future development if the present page does not answer your questions.
This survey of extant resources is presented in terms of the five overarching domains that constitute THDL: Collections, Reference, Tools, Education and Community.
I. COLLECTIONSThe equivalent of the "stacks" in the traditional library where the main textual collections are located, this area provides the primary data in the form of texts, videos, images, databases, maps, audio and scholarship. We have organized these various collections under five overarching rubrics: Thematic Collections, Environmental and Cultural Geography Collections, Special Collections, Resources, and Journals. So in addition to organization along thematic and place-based considerations, the multimedia content is independently organized as resources of various types, allowing one to search for videos, images and audio according to diverse criteria. In this way, the same content can be accessed by thematic type, geographical location, and media type.
Search for Videos and Audio: this and the Search for Images give direct access to our expanding multimedia database of videos, audio recordings and images. The audio-video database is perfectly functional, and has over a thousand titles across many genres - music, lectures, readings, social enactments, rituals, and more. We are currently working on putting it into a more user friendly form, as well as cataloging the videos by place. We also offer a software program called QuillDriver that allows users to view video with synchronized transcriptions. There are over 30,000 images currently posted in the image collection, which is a reliable but fairly simple database. We are currently working at cataloging the images by place, as well as beginning to utilize a much more powerful image management system developed by UVa's Digital Library department.
Search for a Tibetan place: We keep track of Tibetan "features" by means of a database referred to as the Gazetteer. It was first implemented in 2003 in a prototype version, which allows users to search for a place name and see its entry, or navigate to entries via a hierarchical tree of contemporary adminsitrative units. In addition, each feature entry is directly linked to its spatial location on a GIS interactive map. "Features" include administrative units such as "counties", human settlements such as "villages", environmental facets such as mountains, and any other spatially locatable things. We have worked slowly but consistently on a far more powerful version since then. We are in the final stages of ironing out technical issues for a fall 2006 release. This first release includes all 2000+ administrative units of contemporary China which include a majority of ethnically Tibetan populations, and details feature name, feature "type" (i.e. province, village, mountain, etc.), and geographical location in terms of latitude and longitude. The next release will add Tibetan script names and expand coverage to contemporary Nepal administrative units, among other things. Once this is released. Once complete, we will then work on using the Gazetteer as a service to catalog all multimedia holdings, so that users can see all resources such as images and videos associated to the feature covered in a given entry. In addition, we will work on making the GIS map connected back to the Gazetteer, so that users can click on a point on the map and get the corresponding Gazetteer entry. In terms of data, we will also be focusing on beginning to add historical features and information.
Interactive map of Tibet: this demonstration shows a few facets of the fuller GIS model of the Tibetan plateau which we are building with basic coverage of environmental features (52 types of land cover), census data (the full range of 1991 census), administrative units, and human settlements. This map has been built with Flash, which involves extensive manual work. Our long term plan is thus replacing this eventually with the automated GIS map, which currently is implemented but doesn't show all the different layers of information we have. "GIS" is an abbreviation of Geographical Information Services, which in the simplest terms means that all items in a database are georeferenced with latitude and longitude values. This allows one to pose queries to a temporal and spatial database of information and media, and have the results output visually in a cartographic format.
Virtual Lhasa: this interactive map of the capital of Lhasa, which will undergo a major expansion in 2002, shows how we are building textual and multimedia documentation of local Tibetan places embedded within the broader regional model. Users can see slide shows and videos in places highlighted on the map. The current model is most well developed for the old city area, or the "Barkor" – clicking on its name leads to a block model of the entire area, while the far right hand "Meru" monastery allows users to go further into the Barkor to explore a particular building. The revision in 2002 will expand to cover the entire valley of Lhasa, incorporate detailed descriptions of the various areas, and incorporate much more extensive media resources.
3D Monastery: this interactive model of a Tibetan monastery includes embedded media resources and illustrates the possibilities of rich, immersive visualizations of Tibetan places. Users can navigate their way into a three dimensional reproduction of this monastery, which blue circles in each room or space being hyperlinked to textual descriptions and images. The present model has media objects such as movies embedded within it that show the actual place and cultural events transpiring with them. A small film icon pops up as you approach such an object, and by clicking on it, the movie plays below the model. We will be updating the model to include textual information on each room, as well as expand the model to include surrounding areas.
Search Tibetan folk songs: this is the nucleus of our Tibetan musicology project, and at present has 200+ audio recordings of folk and classical music from Kongpo, Lhasa, Tsang and Ngari. The search page allows one to search for songs by different criteria, and then listen to the corresponding song as well as view different categories of information about the song. We plan to expand by including transcripts and the video footage of the same music, as well as building up its analysis of Tibetan musical genres.
Photo essays on Tibetan places and music: these essays are beginning efforts at multimedia documentation of Tibetan places, in this case in relationship to local musical traditions. There are currently only a couple of full length essays, but these will be expanded considerably.
Search Nyingma Gyubum: this and the next item are two of the most important collections of Tibetan literature, and are cataloged and reproduced using a XML-based publishing system for Tibetan literature developed by THDL since 1997. It allows for extraordinarily deep cataloging of texts that then operates as a front end for images of the original texts, searchable electronic texts, translations, and summaries. The power of its XML structure is best shown in the advanced searching facilities, which allow one to see how words appear alone and in various combinations across editions, volumes and texts. "Advanced search" on the bottom takes one to a separate search page, with the results broken down by volume and text title. The texts can be browsed using an expandable/collapsible hierarchy of the categories and/or volumes, with the individual titles linked to rich catalog entries. At present, the catalog is operating as a front end to access scans of many editions, and will eventually also provide access to typed in editions of the texts, translations, summaries, and any ohter resources concerning the text in question. This model is now being extended to the main Tibetan Buddhist canons - the Kangyur and Tengyur - which will be posted in an intial version in 2007. This will include e-editions of the Kangyur in scanned and input forms.
II. REFERENCE
The equivalent of the reference room in a traditional library, this area allows integrated access to information about terms, places, people, works and organizations involved with Tibet and Tibetan Studies. This includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, grammars, gazetteers, timelines, and more.
Use Translator tool: this tool allows one to type in, or cut and paste, Tibetan texts in Tibetan script or transliterated form, and have them analyzed into their component words and corresponding definitions from multiple dictionaries. One can also see our current draft of the OED-style dictionary resource, though our redesigned template which renders it more definitionally based is not yet online.
Look up a Place: this is identical to the Gazetteer discussed above in Collections. In addition to our plans for expanding that, we are designing an Encyclopedia of Places for essay length information about places.
Search for a Tibetanist: this database is an online roster of faculty, researchers, librarians and graduate students of Tibetan Studies that allows each person to maintain information about their education, research and publications for on-line access. The current form has only a few figures in it because we have been waiting until we had solved a Unicode diacritic input system; we play by December to stimulate a major expansion of participants.
III. TOOLS
Largely absent from the traditional library, this area shows more than any other single thing the transformative nature of the digital library. These tools allow the Web to fulfill its promise as a two way medium of interactivity in which knowledge cannot only be disseminated, but also created, refined and transformed on a daily basis. Unlike the traditional library, the digital library provides an array of tools that enables its users to interact with its collections and build a variety of new user-defined collections online. These tools can be classified into three types: basic tools enabling viewing and input offline, interfaces for online submissions and revisions of information, and broader integrated collection building tools that range across different resources and areas of the library.
Our focus to date has been on the first category of tools, and particularly on building an infrastructure for the use of Tibetan script in personal computers and over the Web by the broad community of those interested in Tibet and Tibetan Studies. Over the past year we have been intensively developing the other types of tools, and plan to implement a wide variety by the end of 2002. These will allows scholars from around the world to work on projects online, as well as enable educators and the public to build personal collections online from the digital library resources in integrated fashions. We have also been working on integrating an instructional system known as Efolio into the digital library.
By December 2002, we will have opened up new portions of the Tools area, including a comprehensive presentation of technical documentation for all parts of the Library.
Get Tibetan fonts: we have supported a release of high quality, cross platform fonts freely available for use across the world. We have built a variety of powerful input tools for using these new Tibetan fonts within Microsoft Word, as well as in a free standing Java text editor. In addition, we have provided software allowing for the input of Tibetan script over the Web.
Get Unicode diacritic fonts: these fonts have not been created by us, but are freely available for using diacritic marks necessary to represent Asian languages with global standards.
Get Unicode diacritic input tools: we have built Microsoft Word addins as well as Windows system keyboards for inputting Unicode diacritic fonts.
Sakai:
IV. EDUCATION
Another innovative aspect of the digital library is its dynamic emergence within the very center of the classroom space, whether in the traditional classroom enabling more active and diverse modes of learning, or in the broader virtual classroom being built across the world by various Web initiatives as the dissemination of knowledge undergoes fundamental transformations. This is closely tied to the development of online user-defined collection building tools. However we have rendered into the fourth and final basic area of the digital library in order to highlight its fundamental and integral importance.
Viewing 3D Exhibition hall for student assignments:
Language instructional home page: The current home page is sparsely populated, but as of early 2002 sample materials and software demos will be available from there.