Introduction

I would like to thank Ann, and the Yale Library, for inviting me to share in today's events.

I teach and research for a living in a Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. However, for the past seven years, I have been something of a laboratory experiment in a digital test-tube, as I have migrated much of my life, students and activities into the Library and humanities computing, as well as into proactive community-oriented approaches, even while maintaining my traditional role and position as an individual narcissistic faculty member. The results of this experiment will be the subject of today's presentation.

Academic research, teaching, archiving and publication in North America over the past number of decades has a enjoyed a period of relative stability with a basic political and communal configuration. In this equation, we have such immediately recognizable entities as the disciplinarily bound department, the Library, the Publisher, and the Museum, with well defined social roles and modes of interaction applying to the duly authorized institutional representatives of each. There are, however, persistent complaints that appear to be largely acknowledged by administrations:

* the problems of disciplinary insularity

* remarkably passive students

* a lack of international approaches and partnerships

* an allergy to collaboration in almost all forms in the humanities and social sciences

* a excessive if understandable focus on textual modes of representation in education and publication, to the exclusion of other modes of representation and knowing

* a disconnection with the surrounding communities local and global with which academic activity is, or at least should be, connected ("outreach")

* and the related issue of "relevance", namely how our specialized production and archiving of knowledge is accessible and relevant to others.

Despite the near universality of such complaints and high profile claims to be addressing them as essential challenges that confront us, they continue unabated because they are maintained, and constrained, by the fundamental social and institutional equations that have governed the Academy in the past century. In my own experience at the University of Virginia, the Library is the one place where essentially a laboratory has come into being, a space where – in a sometimes chaotic, often inspiring, and always uncertain atmosphere - a social reconfiguration of the University is being envisioned. Precisely where this is going, how it will gradually ripple across the University, and merge or diverge with other innovative trajectories grounded elsewhere, remains to be seen, but a momentum is beginning to take shape that is not only challenging the old boundaries and roles, but which promises the attainment of a critical threshold in the coming years for the fundamental reconfiguration of academic partnerships governing the creation, publication, dissemination, and collection of knowledge.

Personal Segue

In this regards, I would like to offer a type of intellectual biography of one scholar – myself – who stumbled into a University library some 7 years ago with confused set of agendas and aspirations, and never left. In the process, I have been inspired, deconstructed, and reassembled as a fundamentally different scholar, teacher, professional, and individual, and arrived at a glimpse of a path by which, in fits and starts, we are moving to a new social vision of the academy. I will thus trace my own path through visually tracing a series of projects with which I have been involved.

I should begin with an intellectual confession - I began as a textualist, and even within textualists, a classicist, focused on esoteric Tibetan religious movements in the 11th-14th century. By the mid 90s I had spent much of my life buried in archives and monastic centers all over Asia, and had developed a remarkable ability to live in some of the most interesting places in the world and yet focus obsessively on printed texts rather than social and environmental contexts. The other confession is a social one – I had lived my entire professional life largely as a solitary creature interested largely in his own research, and in particular, had arrived at the University of Virginia at the age of 29 with a PHD, intellectual passions, and no idea what a University was as an institution or a community. I had a vision of knowledge, but it was one which seemed to be blocked by the very structure of the academy, while I fundamentally lacked a coherent vision of community, whether that be the community of knowledge the University is, or should be, or the wider communities in which the University is situated.

Starting with texts

So in this state of being, I began, not surprisingly with texts. In 1998-9, I worked with the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) on creating what we came to call a "thematic research collection" for canonical Tibetan literature". It was about texts - catloging, editions, authorship, colphons, etc.. The project seemed deceptively simple – we had a specific canonical collection that existed in 5 or 6 versions, the largest with 46,000 folio sides, 46 volumes, and over a 1,000 texts. In contemporary scholarship, it was unanalyzed, untranslated, unindexed and even uncataloged. Thus originally the task seemed simple: we would simply catalog the canons to create a comparative canon facilitating access to these texts, with the digital nature of the search allowing for easier access as well as searching.

Our challenges:

* Huge bodies of materials – cite the numbers; how to manage workflow of such a large task

* Integration of various types of materials – catalogs, text images, input texts, scholarly translations, summaries

* Specific bibliographical problems – titles, various types of agents,

* text structure

* value of xml

* direct access, intellectual access

* taking the power of publishing back onto ourselves;

I will thus briefly show you this initiative as a backdrop.

* Advanced Search.

* Talk about Thematic Research Collection – the proactive stimulation and integration of collaborative scholarship.

Text to contexts

In the process of the struggling with these issues, we had weekly meetings in which a variety of associated questions were raised regarding contextualizing literature in its social, historical and intellectual contexts.

We began by calling them “authority file” issues – how did we keep track of the personal and place names referred to in colophons? How to deal with the translation lexicon for rendering texts in English, How to deal with the cultural setting of these religious groups and movements? How to document the social contexts in which these texts were created, read and used in a variety of ways? How to deal with oral uses and commentary on Tibetan literature? In addition, we began to focus increasingly on political and communal issues - How to bind together and support the far flung community of scholars, librarians and the general public engaged with these materials, especially when this was across discipline, institutions, cultures, and nations? Furthermore, how could such work be done so that it fulfilled a strong sense of ethnical responsibility back to the communities which we were studying, namely in Tibet and the Himalayas.

Exploring these questions, and their answers with IATH and the Library, has led us to an expansion of this literary initiative into an international collaboration now involving hundreds of people across the world. In exploring the contexts of Tibetan literature, we arrived at, well, the entirety of Tibetan and Himalayan culture, history and the environment. As a whole, it has developed into an exciting initiative to build a radically new model of how we go about area studies, namely studying a broad region of a world - its people, history, language, culture, environment, geography and other aspects - in a collaborative and holistic fashion. We started with text, and ended up with world.

Show and tell

Oral forms of knowledge/literature:

* Oral commentaries on classical literature: QD stag mo lus sbyin

* Monastic context: Sera chapel; Break down cultural barriers

* Modern literature: Jangbu

* Broader oral traditions: Roofers.

* And then into social world – flirtation; language instructional, communicative contexts, targeted types of language, open up the social world in ways large and small

Dictionary documentation of terminology:

* OED-style historical Tibetan dictionary; thod rgal cut and paste

* Translation tool: also grab a chapter title and put that into translation tool

Ontologies of knowledge::

* avoid traditional problems (monolithic, encode one community's perspective, etc.)

* Encyclopedia: Literary Genres

Places/Spatial

* Gaz: country to show census; then sera resource in itself, but also as service to geo-index all library collections. Encourage spatial thinking.

* Sera: power of mapping, spatial knowledge, break down amorphous monastery into building blocks, detailed exploration. Space essay.

* Lhasa: communally generated lived spaces

* Meru: immersive, tacit means of knowing, rich unexpected discoveries.

Instruction:

* Collapsing boundaries between research and classroom; active learning, giving tools to students to build knowledge. Provide students the building blocks and tools to create their own unprecedented configurations of knowledge.

* TLLR: multilingual interface; historical project

* Three dimensional exhibition hall of student Web work:

* Student-made movies: of music, slides and captions

Publication

* current problems

* JIATS: scholarly credit

* THDL participants: credit

* Granularity to extensiveness

Conclusion: Information Community

I see THDL as struggling to articulate four major things.

1. Scholarly organizations take back control of their publishing: digital pipelines is the core, funding sustainability is second; granular to extensive

2. Collaboration, interdisciplinary

3. New approaches and weaving together multiple modes of knowing _(spatial, visual).

4. Ethical responsibility to others, communal responsibility

Information community:

* deliberately and proactively bringing together people, collections and tools

* knowledge and community

* Library as reinvigorated center of the University.

* Relation of Library to Faculty: Tolerating/indulging patron syndrome needs to be supplemented with one of active working partnerships;

Politics

* In University – librarians, humanities, CS

* NGOs and academics

* Governments

* So-called "outreach"

Other aspects:

* the pleasures of collaboration and conversations therein, still so rare in humanities and social sciences

* Stripping down disciplinary assumptions to begin again, look anew

* Deconstruct the book, and think more broadly, and innovatively, about our intellectual products; take back power over our own intellectual activities and products from the increasingly sterile world of traditional publishing

* A greater understanding for community, and community formation; for a fundamentally asocial person, this came as a bit of a surprise. Across people, disciplines, schools, institutions, cultures, nations. Thinking about what University could be, practically, in contras to what it was, or blue sky fantasies

* Seeing my own work in far greater contextual horizons – placing texts in geography (GIS), seeing how texts are taken up in oral contexts and actual use (audio-video), and much more. Architecture, music, medicine, dictionary making, etc.

* Dysfunctional academics – manage and coordinate people. IATH gave me first lessons.

* Far greater efficient in research tasks

* Buddhist 1. Interdependent origination, 2. magical Web of illusion. When pursued to limits ends up being relationship constituted by everything. From an atom to the world; we started up with texts and ended up with world

* Raise funds (on my check list of things to never learn to do)

* Librarians and Scholars:

* partnership, publication.

* granular to extensive; reference resources.

* along way begin to create links across disinclines across individuals.

* Ontologies – over come traditional problems of ontologies

* alternative modes of knowledge

* space and time and ontologies – interdependence

* Community and Knowledge

* digital pipelines.

* GDMS: build ontological maps. each node structural subdivisions, descriptions, affiliated resources.

* Archives and the Filed

David Germano is Associate Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. He co-directs one of the largest graduate programs in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies in North America. He is author of a number of articles, as well as editor of several books on Buddhist relics and Tibetan history. He is also Director of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, an international initiative involving several hundred projects based at institutions across North America, Europe and Asia. In this capacity, he has led projects involving cultural geography interactive mapping, audio-video archives, thematic research collections of canonical literature, historical lexicography, folk music, and other subjects.

David Germano's B.A. in Philosophy is from the University of Notre Dame; his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies and Asian Religions is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984). He has extensive fieldwork experience in Nepal, Tibet, India, and the People's Republic of China. He and his work have earned numerous awards, distinctions, and grants. He teaches both graduate seminars and undergraduate lecture courses in the Department of Religious Studies, with topics including Buddhist philosophy/culture, ritual/contemplative studies, Tibetan history, Tibetan literature, spoken Tibetan, tantric studies, Asian religious traditions, and cross-cultural studies. He has reading knowledge of French and Spanish, as well as Sanskrit and classical Tibetan, along with fluency in several dialects of colloquial Tibetan and basic knowledge of Nepali.

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