Preserving the Political Oral History of Modern Tibet

FAIN: RZ-50845-08

Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH 44106-1712)
Melvyn C. Goldstein (Project Director: November 2007 to June 2012)

Development of a web site archiving 550 hours of interviews of important Tibetan politicians, with English-language transcriptions of the interviews. (24 months)

The goal of this project is to preserve a unique and invaluable corpus of 378 cassette tapes (about 550 hours) that derive from interviews with important Tibetan political figures on the history of modern Tibet. The project will prepare this corpus for inclusion in a web-archive that will be permanently administered by the Library of Congress (LC). These interviews were conducted by the PI and his staff on prior NEH research projects in Tibet and in exile, and include senior former officials such as Shakabpa, Lhalu, and the Dalai Lama. Extensive work, however, needs to be done before these tapes can be included in such an archive, namely, preparing complete English transcripts of the interviews, creating an interactive online glossary for the special terminology used by the traditional Tibetan government, and marking up the transcripts in XML/Tei language for transmission to the LC. The final English transcripts will total about 10,000 pages.