Foto: Iris Graessner, View over Thimphu

How lucky when work takes one to new and exciting places. Working as a librarian at the Royal Library in Copenhagen may not necessarily be associated with trips around the world. However, twice I was given the chance to visit Bhutan. I traveled in connection with a project funded by Danida (development cooperation under Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in a project called the Library Twinning Project, a cooperation between the Royal Library in Copenhagen and the National Library and Archives of Bhutan (NLAB).

The Library Twinning Project. The development project has been running since 1996, dealing with various issues relevant to national library institutions such as collecting, preserving and making available documents of local heritage. My part in the proceedings was to help set up the library system software used at the Royal Library for use at the NLAB, and it included a visit to Thimphu, where the NLAB is located, first in 2008 and again as an attempt at extending the project in 2010.

Thiumphu, capital of Bhutan. Arriving in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, at first I occasionally found myself gasping for air, as Thimphu lies at an altitude of over 2000 metres above sea level. Walking from the city centre with it’s clock tower and the traffic warden manned street crossing (there are no traffic lights in Bhutan), in the direction of the Changlimithang Dzong, it takes about 20 walking minutes to reach the National Library and Archives buildings.

Exploring the city and commuting to and from work was fairly unproblematic, when taking care not fall into potholes or off the incredibly high curbs and avoiding stumbling over stray dogs. Due to preparations for the coronation ceremony in 2008 there are reputedly now far fewer stray dogs in Thimphu than there used to be, as they for a large part have been exiled to kennels outside of the city.

Dzongs, as the Changlimitang Dzong in Thimphu, are fortresses serving as administrative and religious centres all over the country. Here as well as in remote monasteries collections of various Buddhist scriptures and old texts interpreting aspects of Buddhist doctrines were held, a number of which now are kept at the NLAB. The dominant subject matter of the library’s materials is religious, historic as well as contemporary, in Bhutan religion is very much part of everyday life.

The library building holding the old religious texts is the most interesting and unusual, with altars on each floor that are clearly not seen as mere displays but which local visitors do happen to bow before, and which therefore, to my mind recall some of the atmosphere of such locations where the old texts may have originated.

Work at the library. Adding to the atmosphere is the fact that for work and official occasions Bhutanese are required to wear traditional/national dress. When I found myself standing in front of my Bhutanese colleagues to hold a workshop on how to use the library system software, I was struck by the contrast between the colourful formal work wear of my Bhutanese colleagues, and my regular not-very-interesting western clothes. Regardless, everyone participated enthusiastically, though not always with an understanding of practices that I have come to take (more or less) for granted as part of my training as a librarian.

A traditional part of working as a librarian is registering or cataloguing data about the information resources i.e. books, online journals, micro films of old religious texts etc. owned or made available by the library to its borrowers. Unfortunately, registering data in the official language of Bhutan, Dzongkha, is problematic. This is partly because computer programs often are not up to handling the complex script used for Dzongkha. Not all Bhutanese web sites for instance have a Dzongkha version available along with the English one.

Transliteration, meaning transcribing the Dzongkha characters into Latin, is used, but this is often done randomly. At several college libraries, the library staff explained that they registered their Dzongkha titles transliterating them by ear into Latin characters. There exists a standard system for transliteration called Wylie, but knowledge of this is not common among the library staff. (This seems to be reserved to (Western) researchers and is used at Western libraries, which may be one of the reasons why programs such as library systems have been getting away with not being able to handle special scripts well.)

Also, there is no formal education in the library sciences available in Bhutan. The librarians I met in Bhutan held degrees from Indian, Australian or even European Universities, while several of the library staff had had only local on-the-job training provided by their co-workers, sometimes supplemented by short-term workshops on random topics, including the workshop I was about to hold. Regarding workshops, I had found that hands-on-practice is usually a good idea at a workshop, as it takes some of the focus off the teaching person and it will keep participants engaged more easily.

Names and Surnames in Bhutan. Whenever possible information such as the author’s name is registered together with the title, number of pages, publisher, etc. It can be difficult to determine which names should be catalogued and how, because forms of names differ not only internationally, also through history or even between different groups in a society.

The forms of author names registered by my workshop participants varied greatly, unless of course a helpful person from one team had told the other teams how to enter (or copy) their entry. This led me to try to explain how names should be handled, how we would usually sort names alphabetically by the author’s last name. To come up with some local examples, I asked how one usually would look people up in the telephone book.

This turned out to be a useless example, as telephone books apparently do not exist in Bhutan. Searching desperately for another example, I tried asking about how everyone’s names would be registered when entering a school: Last name, first name, I expected. My workshop participants were amused: I was wrong again.

Though mostly everyone does have two names, these are both first names and if both are used or mentioned, it will always be in the straight forward order. Unless the family has ties to Nepal or India, people have no family name for a last name; parents’ names can thus be completely different from their children’s.

Another fact that can be rather confusing is that most names are not gender specific, and later I learned that a person doesn’t necessarily keep the same name(s). Names may for instance be changed in the course of a religious ceremony, possibly marking a significant step in a person’s life. Many of the historic authors of old texts on Buddhist religious topics have several different names, and titles may be used instead of names.

This seems like a perfect recipe to never be able to find anyone ever, whether as author in a database/ library catalogue or as a library patron owing books. How did we deal with the authors’ names in the end? I found some examples illustrating the various possibilities from international libraries, and the library staff took note of this and continued as they thought best…

Eastern vs. western Bhutan. The official language of Bhutan is Dzongkha, but in Eastern Bhutan another language, Sharchop, is prevalent, other languages and dialects are used outside the cities and in remote areas as well. Later I learned that the language of instruction in schools is English.

The diversity is impressive considering that Bhutan is a rather small country (reputedly the size of Switzerland) with a population of only around 700.000, some of whom live in very remote areas that may take days to reach and are inaccessible to motorised vehicles.

It is often mentioned how Western Bhutan is much more westernized than Eastern Bhutan, this is not surprising as Thimphu is in Western Bhutan, and also it’s where the International Airport in Paro is. Consequently people from the East are regarded as more traditional and religious.

My return for Paro airport a year ago coincided with the return to his summer residence in the Thimphu area of the Je Khenpo, who is a very important figure in Bhutanese Buddhism. Hours and hours before people dressed in their finest were waiting along the highway to Thimphu for a chance to receive a blessing. Someone commented that the people waiting patiently along the road all were from Eastern Bhutan, making it sound like Western Bhutanese were rather more worldly and to cool to be seen standing around like that.

In hindsight. Getting a chance to work for a project like this is completely out of the ordinary, so of course I jumped at the chance. Still I have often thought that there is a reason why there are study programs dealing specifically with how to handle developmental work and projects abroad etc.: some more expertise in this area would have been good for the project as a whole. All in all I felt fortunate to have visited such a fascinating country. And even though the Library Twinning Project is now officially completed, I believe there is plenty of work to be done. I would welcome any and especially local initiatives to move the efforts of the NLAB and other libraries in Bhutan further towards their goals.

Om skribenten

Iris Graessner (1 artiklar)
Iris Graessner är bibliotekarie och arbetar som systemkonsulent för det kungliga biblioteket i Köpenhamn. Iris har en BA från the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen. Via ett projekt sponsrat av Danida (Danmarks motsvarighet till svenska Sida) Library Twinning Project reste Iris till Bhutan 2008 och 2010. Utvecklingsprojektet mellan det kungliga biblioteket i Köpenhamn och det Nationella biblioteket i Bhutan var en rik upplevelse. Som gästskribent för Sydasien reflekterar Iris över projektet och de kulturella skillnaderna hon fann som yrkesrollen bibliotekarie i Danmark respektive Bhutan.

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