The South Asia Open ARchives (SAOA) (available at saoa.crl.edu) continues to enhance its curated collections, expand its
- SAOA continues diversifying its curated collections, providing users with a wider range of resources.
- SAOA’s collections, hosted on JSTOR’s open access platform, total approximately 26,000 items and 800,000 pages (an 8% and 14% quarterly increase, respectively).
- Newly published projects
include: - Madras Newspaper Reports (1896-1921; 1538
issues): digests (in English) of Tamil and Telugu Newspapers, from the collections of the Center for Research Libraries. - Dissents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s-1990s (573 items): linking to ephemera (in English, Sinhala, and Tamil) hosted at Princeton University. This collection documents the activity of a generation of Sri Lankan radical activists who, in their different ways, attempted to escape the claims of rival ethno-nationalisms and build alternative political and development projects, drawing on Marxism, Christian socialism, and feminism, among other inspirations. Thanks to the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS), Princeton University, and University of Edinburgh for bringing together these import resources in order to promote a better understanding of recent leftist movements in Sri Lanka.
- University of Virginia In-kind content (35 titles): monographs and serials located in collections on language and literature, as well as social, political, and economic history. Examples include:
- Indian Journal of Economics (6 issues; 1916-1924)
- Bengal, past & present : journal of the Calcutta Historical Society (3 issues; 1907-1910)
- Succession to Mahommedan states : Jowrah (1865)
- Facing the marauders : a collection of poems of resistance (1900)
- The Tourist's guide to all the principal stations on the railways of northern India (1882)
- SAOA made great strides in loading master files into our preservation archive for the long-term storage of historic content.
- The preservation archive, hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), contains master files of serials and monographs digitized through SAOA.
- The collection currently
comprises 415,000 TIF files reaching nearly 4TB of storage space. Over 350,000 files have been uploaded this Quarter.
- SAOA content is freely accessed throughout the world, ensuring equal access to important content.
- From April to June 2021, there were approximately 35,000 item requests from users across 145 countries including India, U.S., U.K., China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Canada, Germany, and Australia.
- Among the most utilized sources are Madras Legislative Assembly Debates, Jugantar, and Aligarh Institute Gazette.
- SAOA’s outreach efforts have strengthened SAOA’s
network and user community. - University of Virginia renewed its membership and Rutgers University became a new SAOA member. SAOA now has its highest amount of paying members, underscoring SAOA’s
importance in the South Asian studies field. - Neel Agrawal, South Asia Digital Librarian at CRL, gave a presentation on SAOA for International Archives Week, hosted by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and the Government of India Ministry of Culture. This event provided the opportunity for hundreds of researchers to learn about SAOA’s collections, locating
material, and the governance structure. - The updated Publicity Scrapbook (attached) contains SAOA-related social media posts, blogs, news items and press releases, research guides, and web pages.
- What you can do to help:
- Follow SAOA’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for updates.
- Encourage institutions to join SAOA by visiting the How to Become a Member of SAOA page, in order to learn about SAOA’s inclusive membership model.
- Add SAOA (saoa.crl.edu) to your Libguides, A-Z lists, and Course Pages.
- Attach your library’s holdings to the SAOA collection record on OCLC (#1124685807).
- Suggest the digitization of new content through the online suggestion form.
As always, we would like to acknowledge the immense contributions of SAOA Member Institutions, National Resource Centers, partners, and CRL staff. We look forward to making significant progress throughout the summer. Please feel free to contact me with your comments and suggestions. Thank you so much.
Neel Agrawal
South Asia Digital Librarian
Center for Research Libraries
6050 S. Kenwood Ave. • Chicago, IL 60637 • USA
773.955.4545 ext. 362 (main office)