Collaborations

The Library is partner to two digital initiatives that aim to bring key resources to a global audience. The Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) is a collaborative project involving major Universities and research Libraries in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and South Asia as well as national and international organizations and granting agencies. DSAL makes digital materials for reference and research on South Asia - including reference resources, images, statistics, and selected journals and books - available to the public. A second initiative is the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, a partnership of the South Asia Language and Area Center at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the Triangle South Asia Consortium in North Carolina. The aim of this project is to create and disseminate electronic dictionaries for many of the languages of South Asia, including the twenty-six modern literary languages.

The Library is also a participant in several cooperative initiatives to catalog, preserve on microfilm, and make widely available a number of major collections of materials for the study of South Asia. Some of these are collections located on the Subcontinent. These include the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) dedicated to the Roja Muthiah's private library of Tamil materials, and the Urdu Research Centre (URC) for the preservation of the Urdu library of Mr. Abdus Samad Khan. Other projects are dedicated to consolidating and preserving the major works listed in the The National Bibliography of Indian Literature (MIPP, the Microfilming of Indian Publications Project); collections of Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit books in series (the Indological Series Project); and nineteenth-century publications in South Asian languages from the former India Office Library (SAMP, the South Asia Microfilm Project). Microfilms are made available to participating institutions via the Center for Research Libraries.

The Library is also engaged in the preparation of a South Asia Union Catalogue. The South Asia Union Catalogue gathers together existing bibliographic records with new cataloging produced through the above-listed projects in an open-access on-line catalog. There are two aims for the Catalogue. The first is that it should become a comprehensive historical bibliography of books and periodicals published in South Asia from 1556 through the present. The second is that it should become a union catalogue in which libraries throughout the world owning copies of those imprints will register their holdings.