The database "Digital Tibetan Archives Bonn" (DTAB), which has been developed by Prof. Dr. Schwieger and was previously supervised by the Rechenzentrum of the University of Bonn, contains 4,268 digitised Tibetan legal documents, such as deeds and administrative texts, from various archives from the Tibet Autonomous Region and Dharamsala, among others, as well as from four private collections. The documents provided are described in detail and are available as scans and in some cases with transcriptions. CrossAsia completely reorganized the contents of the database in 2024 and transferred it to its own system for sustainability reasons.

Database history

The DTAB database was created between 1999 and 2005 under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Peter Schwieger as the result of two research projects.

The first research project was carried out from 1999 to 2000 with the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). More than 2700 legal documents from the Kundeling Monastery in Lhasa were digitized in cooperation with the archives of the Tibetan Autonomous Region in Lhasa. The necessary expertise was imparted to the local staff in workshops, who carried out the work using a standardized workflow. The database itself was set up in Germany.

The second research project took place between 2002 and 2005 and was again funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).  In this project, various collections were digitized. First and foremost the holdings of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharamsala, India. In addition, there were various German collections, those of the private individuals Kurt H. Dahnke, Andre Alexander (1965-2012), Dagmar and Heinz Czerny and Wolfgang Bertsch. In addition, the collection of Tibetan legal documents from the Berlin State Library was also digitized.

The database created by the project was made freely available to the academic community by the Rechenzentrum of the University of Bonn. However, it was taken offline at the end of 2018 as the necessary updates could not be carried out. Prof. Schwieger's sons, Robert and Sebastian, restored the functionality and CrossAsia relaunched the database in 2020.

 Note and features

• Use the search in the upper right corner to search the metadata and full text (where available) of the document >> your search term will be highlighted in the result set
• Narrow down the results by selecting terms from the filter on the right hand side for archive collection, language/script, date, sender, receiver, form and color of seal. Select a filter by either checking the box and "Apply" or click "+" next to a filter term to directly activate the filter to further confine the result set.
  You may in a second step search within this filtered result set using the "Refine result" search slot
• You may also browse the collection: either by  showing all documents  contained or by performing an  empty search  in order to list all items and use filters

      Show all documents

      Show filter view

•  A selection of metadata is displayed when going to the detail view of a document and when opening the document in the viewer. All original metadata of the previous database is searched and included in the iiif-manifest
• The detail view of a documents allows the download of the iiif-manifest (using the iiif logo) as well as a PDF of the document and - where available - a PDF of the transcribed text of the document

Further sources on the content

Detailed information on the documents from the Berlin collection can be found in two catalogs of the Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD 11,16  and VOHD 11,17); they were described by Hanna Schneider.

 A short overview of the history of the making and movements of the database in the form of a "Foreword" by Prof. Schwieger with some notes from us, about its new form presented now, can be read here.