Overview

The Digital Himalaya project was conceived of by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Dr. Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. Based jointly at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and the Anthropology Department at Cornell University, the project began in December 2000.

The Digital Himalaya project has three primary objectives:

1. to preserve in a digital medium archival anthropological materials from the Himalayan region that are quickly degenerating in their current forms, including films in various formats, still photographs, sound recordings, field notes, maps and rare journals

2. to make these resources available over broadband internet connections, coupled with an accurate search and retrieval system useful to contemporary researchers and students

3. to make these resources available on DVD to the descendants of the people from whom the materials were collected by making them both easily transportable and viewable in a digital medium

Five ethnographic collections representing a broad range of regions, ethnic groups, time periods, and themes were slated for digitisation in the first phase of the project, along with a set of maps of Nepal and important journals on Himalayan studies.

Using the Website

This website introduces the objectives of the Digital Himalaya project and showcases some of our content. The site is updated on a regular basis with additional film clips, viewable photos, PDF downloads of rare journals, maps, technological tips, and other relevant information. If you would like to be updated when new material is added to the site, please register your email address with us, or check the news page each time you visit the site to see what's new.

Users will eventually be able to navigate through the Digital Himalaya collections by taking guided tours, searching the collections by topic, place, date, or other criteria, using map interfaces to select images by locations, or following links from images to relevant text materials.