Oral Tales of Mongol Bards

Technical Realisation

The present digital collection consists of fourteen tales and four epics, originally recorded on cassette tapes in the years from 1984 to1995 and digitized as MP3 and WAV files in 2016 by medienrettung (now avantmedia), a Berlin based service provider for the digitization of media archives.

Handwritten transcriptions of these recordings (as executed in several notebooks from 1992 to 1997 and from 2010 to 2011) were scanned in TIFF format at the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln and subsequently converted to PDF facsimiles.

Catalogue descriptions of the recordings (originally published in print format by Elisabetta Chiodo in 2011) have been complemented by extensive summaries in English language and encoded according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). All content pages of the website are generated from the TEI source code. All files (audio files, transcript scans, summaries and catalogue data) have been archived and published as open data under a creative commons license in the Language Archive Cologne (LAC) in order to guarantee long-term preservation and accessibility of the data via APIs for any kind of data reuse. From the LAC, audio files and PDF facsimiles are embedded into the present website of Oral Tales of Mongol Bards. All contents are browsable via the respective menu and various indices.