Building and Introducing the Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library

Shetler will talk about her work over the last ten years to make digitally accessible the oral tradition interviews from 1995 on, including audio, video, photographs, transcripts and other related materials, to scholars and to people in the Mara Region Tanzania. This was accomplished by a three year National Endowment for the Humanities grant that finished its first year with the digital library website going live in June maraculturalheritage.org. In July Shetler visited Tanzania and was able to talk to people at the University in DSM, the Ministry of Education in Mara and lots of collaborators in the Mara Region who were introduced to the digital library on a cell phone. Project assistants will continue to add to the digital library over the next two years, including adding a collection of materials from a local popular historian dating back to interviews in 1977. The collection holds interviews in many Bantu languages from the Mara Region as well as Luo and Dadog, adding significant value for language preservation. Documents include locally produced dictionaries, core vocabulary lists, music and dance performances, family and community histories and statistical data. Shetler will talk about the joys and challenges going forward in managing this project. Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Bender Shetler, Jan. 2022. Building and Introducing the Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library. Talk Given at Rift Valley Webinar Series 24/08/2022.