The Digital Himalaya Project is a collection, storage and dissemination portal for scholarly content and research findings about the Himalayan region. The project website connects a worldwide user community to a vast corpus of digital resources from or about India, Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan plateau for free and easy download – without payment, subscription or password.
While Digital Himalaya began as a strategy for collecting and protecting the products of colonial-era ethnographic collections on the Himalayas – for posterity and for access by source communities – the project has now become a collaborative digital publishing environment, bringing a new collection online every month, with close to half a million web visitors since its establishment in 2000.
Early digitization projects often face sustainability issues. In this talk Dr. Mark Turin will offer some candid reflections on how Digital Himalaya has been nurtured and supported over 15 years with sometimes unlikely sources of funding, and conclude by discussing an exciting and emerging partnership with the UBC Library system.
Mark Turin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Acting Co-Director of the University’s new Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies.
Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham, Milena Constanda