Status report on Development of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library

This present page is periodically updated to give users a sense of new releases and developments on the horizon.

June 19, 2004. In September 2003, THDL presented a new look and feel, including a significant reduction in sites "under construction". The gazetteer - a guide to place names - was finally upgraded to include display of each point on a map. We also posted an extensive new upagrade to our interactive map of Lhasa, which for the first time documented in draft from the contemporary lived neighborhoods. We also posted a rich interactive map and other resources of the Sera Monastery project, as well as an important new upgrade of the three dimensional model of Meru monastery that included a room by room database. During the ensuing months we significantly upgraded and stabilized the image database of over 25,000 images, and the audio-video collection of over a thousand titles. We have also launched a new Thangmi dictionary and an electronic reprint of Tibetan Literature as the basis for our new Tibetan literary genres initiative. Another important project begun was THDL's general bibliography repository, which deals with Web sites and print resources. This is now available and remains under intensive development in terms of content.

At present we are focused on trying to stabilize the rich dictionary of Tibetan so that content can begin to flow into it, and shortly will release a new Nepali glossary. We are also in the final stages of preparing for a September launching of the Journal of International Association of Tibetan Studies (JIATS), a fully multimedia journal integrated within THDL. We are also focusing on the solication and publication of contributions to our Encyclopedia project which will be launched in earnest at the end of the summer. Finally, we are working intensively on processing Tibetan literature in electronic input versions for broad dissemination.

June 14, 2003. THDL is spending the summer focused on preparing for its grand public unveiling on September 1, 2003 in advance of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies at Oxford. THDL was born in 2000, and has maintained a public presence on the Web since its beginning. Thus its development has been on public view since 2000, "plumbing" and all. Given its ambitious goals, this has meant a myriad of unfinished sites, counter-intuitive navigation and other frustrating features. However, given the open and collaborative nature of THDL as involving partners from around the world, we decided to pursue this course in order to make its development a collaborative process.

This initial period of development is now coming to an end. By September 1, we plan to take off line all unfinished resources, dramatically improve navigation and transparency across the site, and activate a number of major projects. While it won't be perfect, it will mark the first time THDL has presented a unified set of resources intended for public use with no excuses. From that point on, development of materials will be done in the background and only released for public view when ready for serious use.

New Releases

On June 13, THDL finally launched its Community domain, which offers a powerful roster where people and organizations involved with Tibet and the Himalayas can make their own roster entry to publicize their activities and products. It also offers mailing lists and discussion forums. We are now in the final two months of adding an annotated bibliography of Web resources as well as announcements using a new database repository. We are not aggressively pushing use of the Community site yet, but the individual pieces are now active.

On May 15, we released the first release of the Sera Monastery project directed by José Cabezón of the University of California at Santa Barbara. This has a fully interactive map of Sera Monastery linked to names of the buildings and database descriptions of the buildings. This new model based on FLASH-XML is now being extended to Lhasa overall, then to Tibet and then to the entire region. For Sera, we are now working at linking the map to our extensive image collection.

On the Horizon

We are working intensively on dramatic new presentations of image and video collections, though as of today there is no public view of the new formats. By August, we will have the first implementations.

We are now in the final weeks of releasing our dramatically upgraded Gazetteer for Tibetan and Himalayan places.