Dear Colleagues,
We are excited to invite you to the public launch of the South Asia Open Archives online! The launch takes
place at The Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison on Friday,
October 18 from 12:15-1:45pm Central. The launch event will be held at University
Room AB of the Concourse Hotel (second floor) from 12:15 pm to 1:45 pm Central Time. Light snacks and refreshments will be available. (Even if you can’t attend, the SAOA URL — saoa.crl.edu -- will
go live on that date as well.)
South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a rich and growing curated collection of key research materials from and about the region of South Asia, with historical and contemporary sources covering a variety of subjects in English and other South Asian languages. SAOA
preserves, digitizes and makes its content freely accessible to the world on the web. It is the product of a collaborative initiative of a broad consortium of research libraries (in South Asia and around the world) and their respective South Asian Studies
librarians. It is enriched by substantial contributions of content, human and material resources from a community of libraries, research centers, archives and other institutions partnering to bring these resources out for global scholarship and pedagogy. Administratively
hosted by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and presented online for open access in partnership with JSTOR/Ithaka, SAOA aims to serve as a critical node in open access scholarship.
The culmination of five years of intensive work by a dedicated core of stakeholders and widespread partners, the SAOA launch
at Madison will feature live demonstrations of SAOA’s enhanced database functionalities, and will highlight some of our unique historical collections, with time for questions, one-on-one interactions,
and opportunities for hands-on exploration. The event is open to all interested parties, so please spread the word among faculty, scholars, students and librarians at your institution.
As we prepare for this exciting event, the SAOA Executive Board wants to acknowledge that SAOA’s impressive progress wouldn’t have been possible without the active moral and material support for and engagement in this initiative by many of you and your institutions. Please
feel free to contact us (or SAOA’s Digital Librarian Neel Agrawal (
nagarawal@crl.edu) if you have any questions or suggestions. If you have specific content ideas for adding to SAOA’s collection, please use this
online
suggestion form. Thanks so much and looking forward to seeing you at the SAOA launch event in Madison!
Best regards,
Aruna Magier (NYU)
and
David Faust (University of Minnesota)
Co-Chairs of SAOA