Claire B. Blog 1: The Digital Himalaya Project

Initiated in December 2000, the Digital Himalaya Project digitizes archival collections of ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region and provides access through the project website. The Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and the Anthropology Department at Cornell University sponsor the project, and the site offers a number of resources related to the region, and especially to the study of Himalayan social life in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.



Collection Principles:

The project's stated objectives include:

• preserving the various materials collected by anthropologists and travelers of the region, especially materials that are "quickly degenerating in their current forms" (including films in various formats, still photographs, sound recordings, field notes, maps and rare journals);
• making these resources publicly available via the project website, and (ongoing) efforts at improved searching and browsing capabilities; and
• providing access to these resources to the descendants of the people from the region whom the materials were originally collected (via DVD, though I could not find any documentation of whether this has taken place yet).

The first phase of this digitization initiative included vintage audio and visual materials from five anthropological collections from the two sponsoring universities. Two of the most interesting are the collected photographs and 16mm films of Frederick Williamson, a British Political Officer stationed in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet in the 1930s, and the films of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, an anthropologist who lived and worked throughout the Himalayas from the 1930s through the 1980s.


The project certainly contains some interesting and impressive materials, but the site has expanded (not always in the most user-friendly of manners) to be a sort of catch-all for materials relating to the Himalayan region (as opposed to its original intent of preserving and providing access to specific collections). For example, on the main page for accessing the collections within the project, there is a link to "Journals," leading a viewer to think there may be primary works from travelers of the region (the picture on the left is a link to the section, and it even looks like a personal journal!). Instead, you find a link to 30 academic journals focusing on studies of the Himalayan region. This is not to say this isn't a helpful inclusion, but the organization of the site makes it hard to decipher the collection's organizational focus.


Metadata:

Sparse, at best. Some of the photographs offer file name, photographer, caption, and collection name. For materials from archival collections, no information is generally available on box or folder number, if viewers were to be interested in visiting the archive and seeing the materials in-person.

Object Characteristics:

The materials are all over the map in terms of format and access. The photographs rarely offer any sort of zooming, and some of the photos (and videos as well) require navigating to a completely separate website (The Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library) to view the photos from the collection; when you follow the links to this site to see part of a collection, you see a page of thumbnails for the collection, and one level of enlargement and minimal metadata (file name, caption, photographer, and collection).

Songs from the site's music collection are listened to using QuickTime. The film clips are also viewable in QuickTime. One of the interesting features of the site is viewing of the Naga Videodisc collection. This technology was created in the late 1980s at Cambridge University as a multimedia resource, including most of the known ethnographic material about the Naga ethnic groups living in the Assam and Arunachal Pradesh districts of India and parts of Burma( forms included moving film, sound, and photographs, plus text from diaries and fieldnotes). The entire system was searchable as well. The technology, however, "did not take off in the west", and the materials became unavailable. The Naga Videodisc has now been transformed into an online database with a new retrieval system (called "Bamboo"). Stored as XML files, the whole database can be seen and searched at a separate website. As for the Digital Himalaya project site itself, only six short digitized film clips from this collection are viewable (more evidence of this project's status as a clearinghouse).

The site offers PDFs of a number of rare books and manuscripts relating to study of the Himalayan region.

The map feature on the site enables viewers to select maps of various regions, specific map features to add (e.g., rivers, elevation), then .gif or .pdf format for downloading. As with other materials, however, certain maps direct the user to other websites, not allowing for viewing within the Digital Himalaya project.

Intended Audience:

This site likely attracts people from the academic and research communities who probably have some idea of the types of resources they are looking for, mainly from anthropology, sociology, and geography. Site navigation and browsing are anything but intuitive, and it is hard to imagine that someone interested in learning basic history or information about the region would even know where to begin. The almost-complete lack of metadata seems to support this - I imagine viewers are already familiar with the historical context of the materials, thus they are more interested in the physical details of the photos and videos, or the aesthetics of the music.

It is definitely a fascinating site, but I enjoyed it mainly as a way to aimlessly view snapshots of the region's human and geographical characteristics. It seems that the site's organizers have intentions of offering more browsing and searching features, perhaps an admission that the site offers less to the viewer unfamiliar with anthropological studies of the region over the past 100 years. It is, however, an interesting example of how research communities from various locations attempt to thematically organize such diverse materials and store them in one (more or less) location.