The Digital South Asia Library A Pilot Project

A new Digital South Asia Library Web site is available at: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/. That site was officially announcing on September 1, 2000. Comments or questions concerning DSAL may be sent to jnye@midway.uchicago.edu

The University of Chicago Library and Columbia University Libraries are in the last phase of a three-year pilot project on South Asia. The program of work is described in the proposal for participation in the AAU/ARL Global Resources Program. The first semiannual report is also available at this site.

The main objective of this pilot project and the larger AAU/ARL program is to improve access to and delivery of international research resources. The improved access will come from developing the infrastructure for intercontinental electronic document delivery to and from selected South Asia libraries and creating new electronic reference resources, comprised primarily of data entered by project participants in South Asia. In addition to the lead institutions, the Roja Muthiah Research Library and the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram are playing key roles in India.

The Global Resources Program (GRP), developed by the Association of American Universities (AAU) and Association of Research Libraries (ARL), is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The October 1999 special issue of ARL on the Global Resources Program includes an update on this project and a more general statement on GRP by Deborah Jakubs.

In mid-1999, the U.S. Department of Education under its newly created Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access program awarded a major three-year grant to the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) for phase two of the Digital South Asia Library. The support will permit a dramatic increase in the quantity and the range of research resources made available. The proposal with details on planned activities is available at this Web site.

New Project Resources

• Periodicals
  • Articles and Indexes
    • Tamil
    • Urdu: sample page images are available as they will be delivered from Hyderabad.
    • English (and other European languages): Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) is a subscription service. Consult the BAS Web page for more information. Also see the list of South Asia journals indexed in BAS.
  • Union Lists
    • Library of Congress South Asia Serials with holdings of U.S. participant libraries.
    • Irene Joshi's International union list of South Asian newspapers and gazettes.
    • Tamil journals in Madras, including the Roja Muthiah Research Library, Maraimalai Adigal Library, and the Tamil Nadu State Archives.
    • Urdu journals in Hyderabad. The Urdu Research Centre and soon to include the Idara-e-Adabiyat Panjavurta e-Urdu.
• Electronic Texts
  • Official Publications of India
• Reference Resources
  • Electronic texts of publications encompassed in the CIC South Asia Reference Tools Program including a searchable file with the nineteenth-century regional language holdings of the India Office Library and the British Museum collections, under the database heading "OIOC holdings."
• Future Plans
  • Creation of at least one electronic dictionary for each South Asian language
  • Experimentation in use of South Asian scripts in the electronic presentation of resources over the Internet
  • Expansion of our strategic alliances to include locations in other South Asian countries and more North American participants in the Digital South Asia Library program
  • Creation of a Guide to Pakistani Periodical Literature
  • Preparation of digital cartographic files on South Asia
  • Construction of electronic guides to government archives

Related Resources

• , South Asia Resource Access on the Internet, is a catalog of the best Web sites on South Asia.
• The South Asia Microform Project (SAMP), located at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), is a major US repository of research materials.