Tibetan Culture

The Tibetan & Himalyan Digital Library
The Tibetan & Himalyan Digital Library of the University of Virginia Madison is an excellent source for a wide range of knowledge about Tibetan language and culture and perhaps the best of such sources freely available on the Internet. The Reference section contains general bibliographic reference materials, including several encyclopedias and interactive dictionaries, a gazetteer of geographical place names, aids for finding and converting dates and timelines, annotated thematic bibliographies for finding textual resources (including web resources), and resources and indexes of various historical and contemporary people and groups from or involved with Tibet. The Education section includes several on-line video courses for learning colloquial, literary and thematic Tibetan. The Collections section contains all the texts, videos, images, maps and other data in the library database. Users can search across all media as individual resources or collections of these resources organized by various thematic or geographical limits, including Architecture, Art, Environment, Geography, History, Language, Literature, Medicine, Music, Religion and Tantra. The Environmental and Cultural Geography section is particularly unique, with extensive GIS maps and satellite images, including interactive maps of Lhasa and Sera Monastery and several 3-D models. The Community section serves to coordinate communication of announcements and community reports for various parties interested in Tibetan and Himalayan culture, and including community resources for Tibetans.

Tibetan Resource Center
The Tibetan Resource Center of the Rubin Museum of Art based in New York is an encyclopedic database of Himalayan literature and history containing over two million scanned text pages and is a particularly good source for images. The database allows browsing for famous people or places and general searches using Wylie transliteration for titles, persons, subjects, places and outlines.

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