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Tibetan and Himalayan Historical and Cultural Geography Status Report
Content - maps, place essays, new geographical feature entries, images, audio-video, and the like - are added to the site on a daily basis. We will eventually offer facilities to allow users to subscribe to automated weekly updates.
MAPS
October 9 2011: Our collections of static maps represent a non-systematic mix of scanned historical and contemporary maps, as well as maps that THL generated out of its own datasets. If maps are georeferenced, users can project the maps onto our dynamic interactive map, and visualize in relationship to data from THL's PLace Dicitonary. At present, we do not have a systematic plays on either front for the addition of new maps, but we welcome user requests for maps that we might create out of our current datasets, or user contributions of maps that they have scanned, or which we can scan.
POLITIES
October 9 2011: The polities project aims at documenting historical and contemporary polities, as well as their internal administrative units and subunits. The contemporary nations of China, Nepal, and Bhutan can be seen now in the Place Dictionary with their full administrative units, and we have published the first version of historical polities in Tibetan cultural areas. This includes a basic set of introductory essays at the polity level. Our next plan is to greatly expand essay coverage, including for administrative units below the polity level, and to begin to address smaller polities, even at the level of monastery- or family-based small scale polities, in Tibetan areas. We are currently seeking specialized funding for addressing this systematically, and in the meantime welcome individual contributions.
MONASTERIES
October 9 2011: We have released our initial release of Tibetan monasteries, which offers robust coverage of monasteries across the main geographical regions, sectarian traditions, and historical periods, as well as a number of Web republications of Tibetan and English language books dedicated to monasteries. The latter include Tibetan language books by Chömpel from Lhasa, a collaborative volume on Bönpo monasteries in English, and a survey of Western Tibetan Zhangzhung sites by John Bellezza. Our next step is to focus on integrating references to maps in a large body of Tibetan historical literature that we have already input, while also soliciting a wide array of essays on individual monasteries. We are currently seeking specialized funding for addressing this systematically, and in the meantime welcome individual contributions.
In addition, we have large amounts of photographs and audio-video recordings relating to monasteries, but have not cataloged them so that they appear in the Place Dictionary entries for the corresponding monasteries. We welcome volunteers who might be willing to help with this online work.
TIMELINE
October 9 2011: This resource is currently extremely minimal and requires considerable expansion in terms of essays. Ultimately, we would like to launch a historical events database, but this unfortunately requires either considerable volunteer programming help, or a new grant.
If this status report appears out of date, please contact us at 
to request an update, and we will do promptly. Limited staff resources and many projects will sometimes mean activity outstrips documentation.