Case collaborates with Tibet research center to digitize, archive oral history collection
Project to document daily life in Tibet, particularly traditional era before 1959
July 8, 2004 | For more information: Jeff Bendix (216)-368-6070
For nearly 20 years Melvyn Goldstein, the John Reynolds Harkness professor of anthropology and co-director of the Center for Research on Tibet, has been recording the oral histories of thousands of Tibetans.
His goal is to document daily life in that country, particularly as it was lived in the traditional era before 1959, and to make the materials accessible to students and scholars throughout the world.
But Goldstein, like many researchers producing oral histories, faces a technical problem: Tapes deteriorate over time, making them difficult for historians to use. Moreover, it would be extremely difficult for students in Tibet or Nepal to come to Case to hear the tapes firsthand.
So Goldstein, supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, is using an increasingly popular solution, which is to digitize his recordings and put them on-line.
To do that he has turned to the staff of the university's Kelvin Smith Library, and in particular Linda Cantara, its metadata librarian. Digitization, Cantara explains, is being used more and more to preserve archival materials. Often it is a less costly way to provide access to those materials than printing.
To help Goldstein, and other faculty who want to preserve material, the library has been using DSPACE, open source digital repository software developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewlett Packard. DSPACE was initially designed to allow MIT scholars to digitally store and provide access to projects such as conference presentations or research articles in progress. However, says Cantara, libraries have also found it useful for archiving other digital content such as images, audio and video recordings, and historical documents.
In order to get his audio tapes onto the web, Goldstein first has them digitized, then translated into English. The rough translations are carried out by Tsewang Namgyal Shelling, a former member of the Tibetan government and now on the staff of the Tibet research center. Goldstein then checks and edits the translations. The translations are in Word documents which Cantara, with the help of anthropology work-study students, converts into Extensible Markup Language (XML), a widely used format for electronic text markup. The XML encoded document is then transformed to HTML for online display.
Once there, Cantara uses another open source product, Greenstone Digital Library Software, to add information about each document, then index and display the files.
"We can organize the files by categories such as the gender and birth date of the person who was interviewed, as well as the location and language of the interview," Cantara explains. (Some of the interviews were conducted in Chinese). "This level of indexing will make it easier for scholars to browse very specific sorts of information across a wide variety of documents. The software also indexes all the words in all the documents, facilitating full-text searching of the entire archive."
The interview transcriptions will also contain links to the audio archives as well as to abstracts of each interview's contents. "It is amazing to think that with this format, people all over the world will be able to instantaneously access the tapes and search the 30,000 pages of transcripts," Goldstein said. "The voices of Tibetans will be preserved and made readily available for future generations of Tibetans and Westerners alike without ever having to leave their homes or offices."
Cantara said the project has been a good learning experience for herself and other members of the library staff. "Building this archive using all open source software brings challenges," she said. "There's always the tradeoff. Do you spend money and get something that's pretty straightforward? Or do you use something that's free but will require a lot of customization?"
The project also represents a new level of complexity for the library staff. "These are the most complicated materials we've worked with, since they involve digitally archiving audio along with printed materials, so it's been a useful exercise for us. It's also a good example of close collaboration between the library and a member of the faculty.
"Academic libraries have always had the responsibility to collect and preserve," Cantara added. "We're still doing that, only in a different media. I find it pretty exciting."
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