The Digital Himalaya project was established in December 2000 by Mark Turin, Alan Macfarlane, Sara Shneiderman, and Sarah Harrison. The project's principal goal is to collect and preserve historical multimedia materials relating to the Himalaya, such as photographs, recordings, and journals, and make those resources available over the internet and offline, on external storage media. The project team have digitized older ethnographic collections and data sets that were deteriorating in their analogue formats, so as to protect them from deterioration and make them available and accessible to originating communities in the Himalayan region and a global community of scholars.
The project was founded at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Cambridge, moved to Cornell University in 2002 (when a collaboration with the University of Virginia was initiated), and then back to the University of Cambridge in 2005. From 2011 to 2014, the project was jointly hosted between the University of Cambridge and Yale University. In 2014, the project moved to the University of British Columbia, where it is presently located, and maintains a distant collaboration with Sichuan University.
Project Team
Digital Himalaya has a team of 9 individuals who work together to develop user-friendly and accessible online resources: Sarah Harrison Daniel Ho Hikmat Khadka Wachiraporn Klungthanaboon Alan Macfarlane Pragyajan Rai (Yalamber) Sara Shneiderman Komintal Thami Mark Turin The project is supported by an active international Advisory Board, including the following individuals:
General Sir Sam Cowan
Richard Feldman
[Martin Gaenszle
Ann Gammie
David Germano
Mark Goodridge
David Holmberg
Michael Hutt
Kathryn March
Christina Monson
Since its establishment, the Digital Himalaya project has benefited from skilled student interns and research assistants in Canada, Nepal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Funding
For the first five years of active development, Digital Himalaya was successful in receiving competitive grants from many organizations. Once the site was launched and most of the collections were digitized and accessible, it became increasingly difficult to find resources to maintain the online collections. The project still receives support through donations from individuals and foundations, in addition to experimenting with small referral commissions through Amazon.
Financial and institutional partners:
The Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) Program, US Department of Education Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, Cornell University East Asia Program, Cornell University Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University with supplemental support through the Freeman Foundation Undergraduate Initiative Department of Anthropology, Cornell University The Oxford Bön Project The British Academy (Small Research Grant) Anthropologists' Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research at the Royal Anthropological Institute Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund The Crowther Beynon Fund, University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology The Renaissance Trust The Brendish Family Foundation The Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow The Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge SIT Study Abroad Rashmi and Sanjay Shrestha Andrew Clark and Mary Cobb John R. Sanderson Christina Monson Dr. Mary Shepherd Slusser venturethree
Collections
The Digital Himalaya archive has more than 200,000 pages of scanned texts, hundreds of hours of video and audio, over 1,000 maps, and a large collection of original ethnographic content. The project has digitised an extensive set of back issues of Himalayan journals and maps. There are currently 13 collections available, and the newest addition to the archive is a collection of bird reports from Nepal.
Birds of Nepal
Thanks to Tim Inskipp and Carol Inskipp, this collection has 2,155 references on birds in Nepal available to the public, dated from 1975 to 1999. The archive contains multiple sources, from books and scientific papers to published and unpublished reports, offering a valuable source for researchers interested in Himalayan bird populations.
Census of Nepal 2001
This collection contains census data from the National Census of Nepal 2001. The Digital Himalaya team sorted the data for Nepal's 75 districts and their VDCs (Village Development Committee) making this public data available for any user to search and download.