About THL > How to Participate > Cultural Geography Resources > How to Participate

How to Participate in the Tibetan and Himalayan Historical and Cultural Geography

We welcome participation from people from all sectors - scholars of all types, local community members in the region, tourists, students, volunteers (editing, cataloging, proofing, etc), photographers, videographers, programmers, librarians, non-profits, and more. The site's continued vitality is dependent on widespread participation ranging from expert contributions to volunteer offers to input data. Below is a partial list of ways of participating in the site. If you are interested in participating or making suggestions, please contact us at the "contact THL" link at the bottom of this page.

Audio recordings:

• recordings of sites, cultural traditions, events, societies, interviews, etc. all welcome

Bibliographies:

• making bibliographies of references to, and discussions of, places

Donations:

• donations small and large are crucial
• see DONATE button at bottom of screen to make online donations
• request documentation of a specific place for your donation

Maps:

• using Google Earth to locate places
• using GIS to make maps

Place descriptions and information:

• whether of a kingdom, township, village, school, hotel, temple, lake, or anything else
• interested in perspectives of scholars, local residents, amateur scholars, and tourists
• descriptions ranging from one line to thirty pages in length
• data in the form of current or former place names, latitude/longitude, etc.
• collecting and inputting citations from articles and books

Photographs:

• contribute photos with locations
• our goal is at least one photo of every place and geographical feature in the region

Programming:

• especially Ruby on Rails programming
• Open GIS programming

Typologies and Annotations of Topics:

• write a description of a single feature type in our extensive feature thesaurus, such as salt lake, or school, or temple
• contribute other typologies, with or without annotations, that describe cultural and environmental phenomena in the region

Video recordings:

• recordings of sites, cultural traditions, events, societies, interviews, etc. all welcome

Volunteer work:

• editing and proofing data
• cataloging images, audio-video, maps
• editing audio-video
• inputting Tibetan, Chinese, or English texts/data into a computer file

Provided for unrestricted use by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library