བསམ་ཡས། Bsamyas pillar inscription, transcription (rtf)

As of March 2026 the  text is intact and readable. The content — a 2006 methodology note by Dr Mandy Sadan about Hugh Richardson's photographic collection — comes through cleanly.

Signs of digital decay 

The page shows indicators of link rot and infrastructure aging:

• The British Museum link points to thebritishmuseum.ac.uk, the museum's old domain (it moved to britishmuseum.org more than a decade ago, suggesting the site has had little or no maintenance since it launched).
• The Pitt Rivers Museum link uses http:// (not https://), another sign of an unmaintained codebase.

Risk picture

This is a classic GLAM digital heritage project from the mid-2000s: a fixed-term funded initiative (joint Pitt Rivers/British Museum) that produced a rich static site, published it, and then effectively left it running without ongoing curatorial or technical stewardship. Projects like this are vulnerable because:

1. No evident active maintenance — nearly 20 years without updates is a substantial time for web infrastructure.
2. Institutional dependencies — it relies on Oxford/Pitt Rivers hosting indefinitely, with no obvious migration path or backup access point (e.g. no mention of deposit in the UK Web Archive or a repository like the Archaeology Data Service).
3. The underlying database — the site appears to be dynamically generated (note the .php.html URLs on the home page), meaning if the server-side infrastructure fails, the content could vanish even if the institution intends to preserve it.
4. Images at particular risk — the photographic assets are the core scholarly value, but image servers are  often dropped when hosting is rationalised.
5. Internet archive Wayback Machine has captured the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20260104122319/https://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/