Gregor Verhufen (Bonn)

Computerised Cataloguing of Tibetan Books and their Disposal on Internet Databases: a field report from Bhutan and Tibet

In the last years technological development has made an impressive move ahead. With the introduction of the Internet more and more one has also access to databases all over the world, where information is easy to achieve.

The National Library of Bhutan (hencefoce NLB) owns an impressive amount of nearly 20.000 traditional Poti-books (tib. dpe-cha), some of them not to be found anywhere else in the world. With these many books they discovered, that although they have a cataloging system on cards, sometimes, if a scholar was looking for a specific book, it was hard to find right away. Also being aware of the technology-push outside of their country, they decided to look for some expatriates to help them develop a classification for those books and finally store the information on computer. As a Danish funded development-aid project, my Danish colleague Prof. Per Sorensen and myself, having some contact with Bhutan, then started to get interested in the matter.

After some research was done on international library-catalogues concerning Tibetan books, we found that there is no standardised system for these books. We then developed - according to the wishes and needs of the people of NLB - a new classification system for these books, based on scattered information that some of the existing catalogues offered as well as on discussions with the local people. Our main aim at this moment was not a full-fledged covering of whole books, but to have an elaborated classification- and cataloguing system. Taking the new catalogue-system as the basis, we then developed a database-mask, using the freely available literature database WINISIS that had been developed by UNESCO-programmers.

In order to be as close as possible to the original Tibetan books, we then developed Tibetan (in Bhutan commonly called Choeskad, "the language of the Dharma") scripts for the computer as well as along-going keyboard drivers. The input method now is the standard Wylie-Transliteration-System using the equivalent Latin letters on the keyboard, but having the Tibetan scripts on the screen.

Moving ahead with these experiences as background, colleagues of Bonn University including myself got into contact with the Lhasa-Archives, Tibet. We visited the country in 1997. Our intention was to get more information about this institute and to find out ways and means for a possible future co-operation between Germany and Tibet.

The Lhasa-Archives owns an impressive 3 million documents with many different scripts written in eleven languages, though most of it in Tibetan. In addition to that there are again about 500.000 documents kept in the old printing-house inside of the Potala-palace. The archiv ist employing 75 permantent and 25 temporary scholars. It was estimated, that if each person will take a look at one of these document, writing a short description on a piece of paper, it would take them about 100 years to simply open and close each text once. Since many of the documents are in very poor condition, the Lhasa-Archives are seeking help as well as funds from abroad, especially for renovation of the old texts, but also for microfilming, as well as for storing information on the computer.

After some time of consultations, the heads of the Lhasa-Archives offered us about 20.000 to 30.000 documents of the monastery of Kun-bde gling (North of Lhasa) to work on. In discussions among colleagues as well as with the German organisations responsible for the funding, we decided to go for full-fledged covering (scanning) of all the (historical) documents, storing the information on CD-R and pass on the CD's to Germany where the scanned graphics will be reworked. Since the documents are in over-sized format, they need to be split up into smaller, readable formats.

Yet at the same time people in Lhasa are typing the plain text into a word-processor, in order to finally use a search-system, that enables the researcher to look for specific strings in hundreds of documents. Also people there will use a for historical documents modified version of WINISIS for classification and cataloguing the documents. Finally the documents will be put into the internet and thereby enabling all interested scholars to select a document of his choice and do research on it.

We applied for that project, and, given our proposal will be passed, it will start in January 1999.