Written by:
Aruna P. Magier, PhD, MLS
Librarian for South Asian Studies & International Relations
The NYU Libraries is a founding member of an exciting open-access digitization initiative that breaks new ground in international library cooperation. After five years of intensive planning and development, we launched the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) in October 2019. This growing, curated collection currently contains more than 600,000 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 provides the hosting platform for the online implementation, with advanced database features and user interface.
Many primary and secondary research sources on South Asia are digitized and distributed commercially. But SAOA is recognized as a really 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. I am particularly grateful for the opportunity SAOA has provided me personally to engage with librarian colleagues and diverse communities and their unique collections around the world.
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. In the next 5 years we will also expand coverage to other themes and resource types, such as data, image archives, diverse languages, minoritized groups, and geographic regions. SAOA’s contents and thematic scope continue to grow at a rapid pace.
Five years ago, to help develop the vision for SAOA, I laid out the selection guidelines for an initial working group to help launch the initiative, recruit participant institutions, and secure the needed funding and partnerships to digitize and preserve rare and endangered South Asian materials. Later, when this open-access project became a formal consortium, NYU joined as a founding member and I was elected to the SAOA Executive Committee to help formulate its strategies and direction in successive five-year plans. In the role of Chair of the Digitization Working Group, I work with the team in shaping the SAOA collection and networking with scholars, librarians and partners to identify, prioritize and digitize relevant content to bring online going forward. Our next five-year plan highlights our path for decolonizing access to diverse and inclusive content. I am honored to have been re-elected to a second term on the Executive Board, and to have been appointed by my colleagues as Co-chair of the Board.
The launch of SAOA turned out to be well-timed. Improving preservation, discovery and access to 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 around the world is severely limited or impossible. This initiative has captured the attention of many scholars and institutions that are eager to join forces with us and help enhance this community resource. SAOA currently has 26 committed member institutions contributing resources to sustain and grow it.
Read more in the full press release from JSTOR. For more information about SAOA and visit the CRL website.
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