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)

Open access journal, Himalaya, has new editors

Himalaya, the journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies, has new editors.  Sienna Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, with a research interest in social study of medicine across the Himalayan region.  Mark Turin is Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative and directs the Digital Himalaya Project at Cambridge and Yale universities.

The new editors write: 'We are honored to be taking over the editorship from Arjun Guneratne, who has worked tirelessly over the last five years to develop an already strong publication into an internationally recognized peer-reviewed journal. Through an innovative partnership with the Macalester College library over the duration of his editorship, Arjun has built an open-access, online repository of the entire back archive of HIMALAYA that is freely available to all, with a rolling two-year window for recent issues to be uploaded and viewable. This makes our journal a leader in the 'open access movement', the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly work, a policy to which we - as the incoming editors - are deeply committed'.

Volume 31 was published last week. Volume 32, a special issue on Ladakh, is expected to be published by December 2012. Volume 33 will be the first issue produced through the Dartmouth-Yale partnership, and a themed issue on gender in the Himalaya is being explored.  The new editors are also keen to include papers presented at the Second ANHS Himalayan Studies Conference convened by Dr. Mahendra Lawoti at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in September 2012.

The editors invite readers to get in touch with them with any questions or proposals for future themed issues, and to visit their website for further information about ANHS Publications, http://www.anhs-himalaya.org/publications/