Salvaging the records of salvage ethnography: The story of the Digital Himalaya Project

Abstract

The Digital Himalaya Project is a collection, storage and dissemination portal for scholarly content and research findings about the Himalayan region. The project website connects a worldwide user community to a vast corpus of digital resources from or about India, Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan plateau for free and easy download - without payment, subscription or password.

While Digital Himalaya began as a strategy for collecting and protecting the products of colonial-era ethnographic collections on the Himalayas - for posterity and for access by source communities - the project has now become a collaborative digital publishing environment, bringing a new collection online every month, with close to half a million web visitors since its establishment in 2000.

Almost all of our digitization and scanning is now conducted in Nepal, dramatically reducing operating costs and increasing productivity. Our funding no longer comes from research councils in the United Kingdom and the United States, but through web referrals and from individual or institutional donations around the world. The project is now supported by people and organizations that recognize the work and want to contribute to it.

In short, what began as an academic research project a decade ago is now a vast online portal for hosting and disseminating knowledge about the Himalayas to a demanding, fast-growing and truly global user base.