Caspiana is product of Harvard University's Davis Center Program on Central Asia. It provides resources to students and scholars of Central Asia and the South Caucasus by supplying links to selected media sources, government portals, legislation databases, statistics, and academic resources to study eight countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Caspiana was started by Nargis Kassenova and myself (Cian Stryker). We hired research assistants from each of the target countries to compile sources and list them in a Google Drive. At a later date, I recreated Caspiana in a spreadsheet format and then we used Omeka to create the actual website. This Github repository's purpose is to describe how Caspiana is formatted to anyone interested, but also to serve as a guide for Davis Center Program on Central Asia Research Assistants who need to update or maintain the website.
Caspiana is maintained in three forms: in an Omeka website, in a Google Drive, and in a Spreadsheet. Maintaining Caspiana requires you to update all three formats. The Omeka Website uses some programming languages for maintenance and so those sections will include code sheets and explanations. The Spreadsheet guide will walk you through how the dataset version of Caspiana is organized and how you can use it to maintain the Omeka site. The Google Drive is more self-explanatory, but I include links to access it and some basic information on navigating its formatting. The Maintenance Guide is largely just a walkthrough of how to update the website, but I will also include information on how to export the Omeka website in an emergency.
Caspiana's website can be seen at https://caspiana.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/. If you are a research assistant that needs to login in to CASPIANA's email address or to log in to the Admin side of CASPIANA's Omeka website, please see the Administrative Information document in the Google Drive. Note that you must have been added to this Dirive as an editor to access the information.