SAOA is developing carefully curated thematic research collections in various languages by digitizing key print and microfilm holdings supplied by our cooperative network of Member Institutions across South Asia and the U.S. The Content Curation Working Group encourages scholars and members of the public to use the online suggestion form [1] to submit suggested resources for inclusion in SAOA. Please contact SAOA (saoa@crl.edu [2]) with any questions or clarifications on using the form, or on any other query related to suggested items.
SAOA prioritizes the following types of out-of-copyright material for digitization:
Gazetteers and Census Reports
Statistical and Annual Reports
These are SAOA’s technical guidelines for digital files derived from text-based materials (in print, microfilm, or microfiche) to be included in SAOA’s digital collections. Digitization providers (commercial entities as well as academic institutions) will be expected to conform to these specifications to ensure consistency of the digital materials for ingest into the SAOA digital asset management system. The following are the ideal specifications for ingesting image-based material into SAOA’s collections.
Estimates of the total number of images, total number of volumes (for serials and multi-volume monographs), and if possible, total file size (in MB, GB, or TB),
Details regarding the condition of the print or microform material.
Use one of the following metadata schemes: Dublin Core or MARC21.
Be provided in one of the following metadata/catalog record file formats: MARC XML or CSV.
Conform to SAOA’s metadata template (for example, for monographs vs serials).
Include accurate holdings information for serials or multipart titles.
Have been provided in a sample set of records for SAOA staff to review during the proposal phase, as specified above.
NOTE: the data entered into Forum (or copied/pasted into Forum) will be UTF-8. SAOA’s hosting platform defaults to UTF-8 encoding for data entry.
Master image files for preservation: TIFF images,
Last updated: September 14, 2021
SAOA is committed to the preservation of, access to and discovery of resources (digital assets as well as the associated metadata) created by and facilitated through SAOA. The cooperative and federated nature of SAOA necessitates that this preservation, access, and discoverability may take many forms, differing timelines, and separately determined costs, depending on the nature and scope of each individual project. As such, each project may need to be interpreted and championed on its own terms but SAOA is guided by the principles below.
The long term maintenance of digital content is central to SAOA’s mission but responsibility for it may be distributed depending on creator and institutional capacity. To the extent possible, SAOA strives to preserve its digital files according to established digital preservation standards for stable and flexible format (ex., tif image files). A long-term goal of SAOA is to preserve a dark archived master of every SAOA-affiliated resource in a SAOA-controlled repository.
Digital master files created by SAOA will be stored in a dark archive by CRL.
If a SAOA partner has the institutional capacity to preserve digital files (a “trusted digital repository”), they will be maintained at the partner institution, pursuant to that institution’s policies and procedures. Any access and/or discoverability files will be required to point back to the preservation files in associated metadata.
If the SAOA partner does not have the institutional capacity to preserve digital files, they will be transferred to a dark archive at CRL.
Free and open access to materials associated with SAOA is paramount to SAOA’s mission. Building upon SAOA’s distributed and federated nature, SAOA strives to avoid duplication and to encourage digital file accessibility (“hosting”) from multiple institutions. SAOA strives to provide access to multiple access file types (ex. JP2, JPG, PDF).
Digital files created by SAOA will be made openly accessible through SAOA platform(s).
If a SAOA partner has the institutional capacity to make digital files accessible in a stable and sustainable way, with institutionally-supported permanent URLs for each item (i.e. to “host” them on their own repository servers), they will be maintained at the partner institution following that institution’s policies and procedures.
If the SAOA partner does not have the institutional capacity to make digital files they have created accessible in that fashion, or if in the future, they are unable to maintain their provision of access, the files will be transferred to SAOA for ingest on SAOA’s platform(s).
SAOA resources are made valuable through their discovery and use. The cooperative and federated nature of SAOA determines that this discovery may take many forms depending on the nature and scope of each individual project. The long-term goal of SAOA is to enable integrated discovery across the SAOA corpus of resources, encompassing materials hosted through SAOA platforms, partners, and other institutions.
All SAOA resources have sufficient technical and descriptive metadata to be discoverable.
All metadata will be openly and sustainably maintained on web-based platform(s).
All metadata will follow established standards (ex. MARC, Dublin Core).
All metadata will be open and exposed for harvesting, by SAOA or other interested institutions.
Last updated: December 21, 2017
The Selection Guidelines, prepared by the Content Curation Working Group, help guide the evolution and expansion of SAOA’s curated collection, building on SAOA’s first Five-Year Plan, its five years of evolving collection development experience, and the FY21-25 Five-Year Plan. In our second five years we will broaden SAOA’s collection scope to incorporate additional themes, more coverage of under-represented geographic areas of South Asia, greater diversity of languages, communities, new resource types (such as audio/visual material, video, data sets, and maps), and wider date coverage (including post-colonial materials). With these criteria in mind, SAOA considers proposals submitted by anyone through its online suggestion form.
(The following themes are not mutually exclusive, due to their multidisciplinary scope.)
Dated: May 15, 2020 & Updated June 4, 2020.
Prepared by the Content Curation Working Group: Aruna Magier (Chair), Deepa Banerjee, Abhijit Bhattacharya, Gary Hausman, Jeffrey Martin, Gautham Reddy
SAOA fosters robust online research on South Asia through its mission to produce and preserve digital content, to make digital content openly accessible, and to foster communities committed to collaboration through open access.
The following principles, prepared by the SAOA Executive Board and reviewed by the SAOA membership, function as a dynamic document to inform collection development decisions for the allocation of resources (financial as well as human):
Dated: March 23, 2019
Links
[1] https://airtable.com/shrp5mo7pD2Y4dBq6
[2] mailto:saoa@crl.edu?subject=SAOA%20Content%20Proposal%20Questions
[3] https://brill.com/fileasset/downloads_products/31800_Guide.pdf
[4] https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/off-1984.html#Heading2
[5] http://dsal.uchicago.edu/bibliographic/unionlist/unionlist.php
[6] http://dsal.uchicago.edu/bibliographic/nbil/aboutmipp.html
[7] https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007547563
[8] https://www.crl.edu/selection-principles