Written by:
Aruna P. Magier, PhD, MLS
Librarian for South Asian Studies & International Relations
After five years of dedicated planning and development, the NYU Libraries is a founding member of an exciting open-access initiative that breaks new ground in international collaboration: the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA). This growing, curated collection contains more than 450,000 pages of digitized historical and contemporary sources in the arts, humanities, and social sciences from and about South Asia. SAOA was born as a collaborative grassroots movement among US research libraries, including NYU, working closely with other partner projects, libraries, archives, and research centers in the US, South Asia, and around the world. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has provided an administrative home for SAOA, while JSTOR offers the hosting platform for the online implementation, with advanced database features.
Many primary and secondary research sources on South Asia are digitized and distributed commercially. But this is such an exciting example of how far international collaboration can help us democratize access, bringing out high quality and unique content for free global access in support of research and teaching. This is one of the most rewarding aspects of my library career, in service to NYU and the world scholarly community.
Five years ago, to help develop the vision for SAOA, I laid out the selection guidelines of an initial working group to help launch the initiative and secure the needed funding and partnerships to digitize and preserve rare and endangered South Asian materials. Later, when the open-access project was fully underway and became a formal consortium, NYU joined as a founding member. Magier became the Digitization Working Group's chair, which shapes the SAOA collection and works with scholars and partners to identify and digitize relevant content to bring online.
I am now co-chair of SAOA's Executive Board. Over the years, I have taken on a central role in shaping and advancing the project's goals, policies, guidelines, and international partnerships.
The launch of this project turned out to be well-timed. Improving discovery and access to these essential resources that are otherwise hard to find is always valuable, but it is especially important during times like these when physical access to many libraries is severely limited or impossible.
SAOA's rich collections include colonial-era books, journals, women's magazines, census reports, newspapers, administrative documents, and archival materials relating to themes of caste and social structure, social and economic history, literature, and women and gender. Its contents and thematic scope continue to grow at a rapid pace, Magier says. This initiative has captured the attention of many scholars and institutions that want to join forces to help enhance this community resource.
Read more in the full press release from JSTOR. For more information about SAOA, visit the CRL website.
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