Update from South Asia Open Archives (SAOA)

Dear Colleagues,

We’re excited to share updates about the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) (formerly SAMP Open Archives Initiative). This collective of nearly 25 libraries from the US and across the Subcontinent is dedicated to creating a freely accessible, curated collection of historical research materials on South Asia. We hope this brief update provides details into some of SAOA’s activities as we’ve taken significant steps toward building our foundation, with a goal of launching a digital archive in 2018.

SAOA is developing carefully curated thematic research collections in various South Asian languages (including English) by digitizing key print and microfilm holdings supplied by our cooperative network of Member Institutions. This content will include:

• Colonial-era administrative and trade reports
• Women’s periodicals
• Newspapers and magazines
• Census materials and gazetteers
• Important literary and other monographic sources

For example, SAOA has already begun digitizing a selection of early twentieth-century monographs listed in the National Bibliography of Indian Literature, including the Bengali titles Mandirera Kathā and Gāna: Sarala Svaralipisambalita.

SAOA has also recently collaborated with Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) in Chennai, India to digitize Tamil Women’s Journals from the early 1900s such as Mātar Manōrañcini and Pen Kalvi.

We highly encourage the research community to suggest additional titles to be considered, through SAOA's online suggestion form.

Beyond creating free and open access to the range of content outlined above, we are also working to launch a modern, sophisticated, full-featured platform for discovery, hosting, and presentation of SAOA’s content that meets the needs of researchers, scholars, students, and the general public for material on South Asia. In the meantime, please have a look at a brief article on SAOA posted by Center for Research Libraries as well as a presentation from CRL’s Global Resources Collections Research Forum.

Hopefully this update inspires you to help us expand the SAOA network by referring your colleagues to our How to Become a Member of SAOA webpage. We will share more progress with you over the coming months. Please feel free to contact me or members of our Executive Board if you would like to discuss any aspects of SAOA.

Neel Agrawal
South Asia Digital Librarian, South Asia Open Archives (SAOA), Center for Research Libraries(CRL)

Times of India 1838-2002

Times of India 15 August 1947 (Credit: Prabhvir, Flickr, creative commons)

Cambridge University Library and the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge are delighted to announce the purchase of the The Times of India historical database covering the period 1838-2002.  The newspaper provides a huge resource for modern Asian studies, economics, development studies and politics generally, since the newspaper covers Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and all the countries of South-east Asia, quite apart from relations between India, a growing world power, the USSR (Russia), Britain and the USA.

The ProQuest database incorporates the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (1839-1859) and Bombay Times and Standard (1860-1861), as well as the Times of India (1861-current).  The Times of India is often reported to be "the world's most widely circulated English daily newspaper", and the database is certainly wide-ranging in its subject base as well as its geographical content.  Researchers studying topics as diverse as comparative religion, the Indian film industry,  the rise of Pakistan as a nuclear power, or the creation of Bangladesh will find rich resources, as will family historians or lovers of cricket.

The database allows users to browse complete issues of newspapers from cover to cover or to cross-search 164 years of newspapers.  Searches can be restricted to different parts of the newspaper, and limited by author, topic, date or date range. It is possible to view photographs, cartoons, obituaries, marriage announcements and advertisements as well as editorials and articles.  Relevant articles can then be printed, emailed or downloaded in pdf format and citations stored in a number of styles.  The 'My Research' feature allows users to track searches, save articles, create bibliographies and web pages.  The database can also be searched simultaneously with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post historical databases, resulting in some fascinating comparative reportage.

The database may be located from the Centre of South Asian Studies website - http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/links.html#Newspapers
and from the University Library's Electronic Resources directory under newspapers, ejournals or databases, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/fulllist.php?search_term=T
Select Times of India from the list, then select News - The Historical Times of India from the drop-down list of databases.