Vol.25, No. 01	Sept. 3, 1999

Digital Library Project Creates Global Digital Access to Collections in Southeast Asia, India and Nepal

The United States Department of Education will fund two collaborative projects initiated by Columbia University Libraries and the University of Chicago. The first will make South Asian research resources and library collections available through an enhanced digital South Asia library, and the second will bring digital South Asian language dictionaries online via the World Wide Web.

Over the next three years, the partnering institutions will receive funds from two education department grants totaling $1 million.

The projects will create global digital access to select collections in India, Nepal and the other nations of South Asia. The privately-held collections being worked on in Phase I of the project include books, manuscripts, pamphlets, images, dictionaries and journals in two of the most commonly studied South Asian languages in this country: Urdu and Tamil. The projects will begin in October.

"The exciting thing about this project is that it benefits all involved," said Elaine Sloan, Vice President of Information Services and University Librarian. "Not only will scholars world-wide have access to these rare collections, the project will also bring technology such as computers, technology transfer, high-speed Internet access and staff training to libraries in areas of the world where digital access to research resources has been a rare luxury."

The first three-year $540,000 grant builds upon a highly successful two-year pilot project, the Digital South Asia Library, which was funded by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Global Resources Program with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Initiated by David Magier, director of Area Studies and South Asia Librarian at Columbia, and the bibliographer for Southern Asia at University of Chicago, the project developed an Internet-based infrastructure for intercontinental library collaboration through the electronic indexing of select Tamil, Urdu and English journals, the full-text electronic conversion of eight classic South Asian reference books and texts and the creation of a Web site making the project's new electronic resources globally accessible.

The newly-funded project will carry this initiative one step further, adding digital access to the unique collections of two libraries—the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Madras, India, a 100,000 item collection considered to be one of the best archives of the modern Tamil language, and the Urdu Research Center in Hyderabad, India, a collection of some 50,000 items in Urdu.

While bibliographic work on these two collections was already begun under the Global Resources Program, the new grant extends the access to include digital document delivery. The grant also enables the project to encompass a third South Asian collection—the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Katmandu, the world's most comprehensive repository of Nepali language materials, containing more than 17,000 books and runs of more than 3,600 journals covering the entire span of Nepali publishing.

"At present, library collections in the United States are distinctly ill-equipped to provide scholars with access to early journal articles and materials in the Urdu and Tamil languages," said Magier, co-director of the project. "We have proposed an innovative collaboration for international educational exchange. Rather than following a 'colonial plunder' model of material collecting to enhance the resources of our respective institutions, we establish relationships with significant institutions and valuable collections in South Asia itself."

The second US/DE grant, $445,000 over three years, has been awarded to Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the Triangle South Asia Consortium in North Carolina, partnering institutions in the creation and dissemination of electronic dictionaries. Key, established dictionaries will be identified for each of the 26 modern literary languages of South Asia and will then be converted to digital formats.

All data products and benefits of the project will be presented online via SARAI (South Asia Resource Access on the Internet), at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/area/sarai

For further details on the Digital South Asia Library project, see the full text of that proposal at: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/LibInfo/Subjects/SouthAsia/606.html.