The Tibet Oral History Archive Project and Digital Preservation

The Tibet Oral History Archive Project 1 (TOHAP) is part
of the research and education program of the Center for
Research on Tibet in the Department of Anthropology at Case
Western Reserve University.2 The Center was created in 1987
by Melvyn Goldstein, John Reynold Harkness Professor of
Anthropology, and Cynthia Beall, Sarah Idell Pyle Professor
of Anthropology, to generate and disseminate new knowledge
about Tibetan culture, society, and history, and was the
academic pioneer in opening Tibet to in-depth anthropological
and historical research. The TOHAP builds on a series of
fieldwork-based studies that have examined the adaptation of
Tibetans to high altitude, and the changes that have occurred
since Tibet's incorporation into the People’s Republic of China
in 1951.
The Tibet Oral History Archive includes three primary
collections:
• The Common Folk Oral History Collection: nearly 2,000
hours of interviews with hundreds of ordinary rural and
urban Tibetans about their life experiences. Since the
number of individuals in Tibet who were adults in 1959 --
the end of the traditional era -- is rapidly dwindling, there
is particular urgency to document the voices of ordinary
Tibetans in order understand the diversity of life as it was
lived in Tibet as well as the way the salient historical events
played out among the different strata of society.
• The Political History Collection: approximately 400 hours
of historical interviews with former Tibetan government
officials who played important roles in modern Tibetan
history, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama. These
interviews cover the traditional period before Tibet was
incorporated into the People's Republic of China
(1913-1951) and the subsequent period up to the end of the
Cultural Revolution in 1976.
• The Drepung Monastery Collection: approximately 350
hours of interviews with about one hundred monks who
were members of Drupung Monastery, Tibet's largest
monastery, at the end of the traditional era. These interviews
are unique in that they provide the only in-depth window
into large-scale monasticism in traditional Tibetan society Conducted primarily in the Tibetan language, the interviews
were taped on audio cassettes which have subsequently been
digitized in three formats: archival WAVE files, medium format
QuickTime files, and compressed delivery MP3 (MPEG) files.
The interviews have been transcribed and translated into English
and were initially saved as Microsoft Word documents.
Professor Goldstein, Editor of the Archive, has partnered with
Kelvin Smith Library to prepare the audio files and transcripts
for online dissemination and long-term preservation. For online
dissemination via the World Wide Web, we are converting the
Word documents to plain text and encoding them in XML using
the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Document Type Definition
(DTD) for Transcriptions of Speech.3 To facilitate
understanding, the Archive will also include a glossary of terms,
encoded in XML using the TEI-DTD for Printed Dictionaries.4
A programmer has been hired to create a Web-based tool for
creating the glossary and an application for automatically
encoding extended pointer notation to link terms in the
transcripts to their definitions in the glossary. Work is also
underway to design an end user interface which will include
browse and search functions. In the meantime, we are
temporarily transforming the XML files to XHTML and using
the Greenstone Digital Library Software to facilitate local
access.5
A larger concern, however, is how to ensure long-term
preservation of and access to the Archive. In 1996, the
Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and Research
Library Group (RLG) Task Force on Archiving of Digital
Information published a seminal report on the long-term
preservation of digital resources.6 Since then, virtually every
significant publication about digital preservation has indicated
that primary responsibility for initiation and management of
the metadata necessary to ensure long-term access to digital
resources begins with the creator of the resource. Traditionally,
it has been the role of librarians and archivists to ensure
long-term viability of and access to cultural heritage materials,
but this is not within the realm of expertise of the majority of
scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Thus, if the
creators of digital resources are responsible for initiating
lifecycle documentation of the descriptive, administrative, and
structural metadata necessary to migrate, emulate, or otherwise
translate existing resources to future hardware and software
configurations -- a task foreign to most discipline-based scholars
-- close collaboration with information technology professionals
early in a project is imperative.
Protocols and standards for digital preservation are now under
vigorous development, yet there are still many unknowns. For
the short-term, multiple copies of the audio and XML files will
be maintained in multiple locations at Case Western Reserve
University, both at the Center for Research on Tibet as well as
in Digital Case, Kelvin Smith Library's Fedora repository.7
For the long-term, the Asian Division of the Library of Congress
has expressed interest in hosting the completed Archive. To
prepare the Tibet Oral History Archive for deposit with the
Library of Congress, we are creating a Submission Information
Package (SIP) in compliance with the Reference Model for an
Open Archival Information System (OAIS),8 using the Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), a metadata
standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural
metadata regarding objects within a digital library.9 This paper
will present a prototype for scholar-librarian collaboration in
the digital preservation of multimedia resources, including a
discussion of the practical aspects of constructing a METS
document for the Tibet Oral History Archive, with particular
attention to the multiple metadata standards that must be
bundled with the digital files to create a robust Submission
Information Package.
1. This project is sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation with
additional support from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (grant no. RZ-20585-00) and the National Geographic
Society.
2. The Center for Research on Tibet Web Site is <http://www.
case.edu/affil/tibet/index.htm> .
3. Chapter 11 of the TEI Guidelines (P4); see <http://www.te
i-c.org/P4X/TS.html> .
4. Chapter 12 of the TEI Guidelines (P4); see <http://www.te
i-c.org/P4X/DI.html> .
5. Greenstone is open source software for building and distributing
digital library collections, produced by the New Zealand Digital
Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and
distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info
NGO. See <http://www.greenstone.org> .
6. Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and Research
Library Group (RLG). Preserving Digital Information: Report of
the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information. May 1996.
Online at <http://www.rlg.org/legacy/ftpd/pub/
archtf/final-report.pdf> .
7. Fedora™ Flexible and Extensible Digital Object Repository
Architecture -- is an open source digital repository management
system, developed by Cornell University and the University of
Virginia, available at <http://www.fedora.info> .
8. A SIP is "an information package that is delivered by the producer
[of a digital object] to the OAIS for use in the construction of one
or more AIPs [Archival Information Packages]." See "OAIS
Terms". Digital Preservation Management: Implementing
Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems. Cornell University
Library. 2003. Online at <http://www.library.cornel
l.edu/iris/dpworkshop/working/terminology/o
ais.html> . See also, Consultative Committee for Space Data
Systems (CCSDS). Reference Model for an Open Archival
Information System OAIS). CCSDS 650.0-B-1. ISO 14721:2003.
January 2002. Online at <http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.go
v/nost/wwwclassic/documents/pdf/CCSDS-650.0
-B-1.pdf> . 9. METS is maintained in the Network Development and MARC
Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being
developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation. See
<http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets> .
Bibliography
The Center for Research on Tibet's Web Site. Accessed
2005-03-29. <http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet
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"Chapter 11: Transcriptions of Speech." TEI Guidelines (P4).
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www.tei-c.org/P4X/TS.html>
"Chapter 12: Print Dictionaries." TEI Guidelines (P4).
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www.tei-c.org/P4X/DI.html>
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Greenstone. University of Waikato. Accessed 2004-07-16. <h
ttp://www.greenstone.org>
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