Working Groups

Members of SAOA are encouraged to get involved in the project by joining one of SAOA's Working Groups.  These three Working Groups are standing bodies of SAOA and report to the SAOA Executive Board.  They work in close consultation with each other and with the Program Coordinator, South Asia Open Archives.

The Content Curation Working Group solicits ideas for new SAOA content from scholars and librarians, conducts research on available holdings, and selects and prioritizes materials for Executive Board consideration, on all matters associated with SAOA's core mission of providing digital resources for open access. These include, but are not limited to, consulting with other digital projects and archives for content, selection of titles for inclusion, and approaches to copyright clearance for titles. Consults with other SAOA Working Groups as appropriate.  

The Funding Working Group provides recommendations to the Executive Board on all matters associated with the financial well-being of the SAOA.  These include, but are not limited to, fundraising from external sources, development of cash flow projects, and solicitation of new members.

The Infrastructure Working Group provides recommendations to the Executive Board on all matters associated with the supporting technological framework of the SAOA. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Administration, staffing, and strategic partnerships  
  • Ongoing support for process improvements, standards updates, and SAOA site enhancements
  • Standards for digitization and metadata, the initiative's SAOA’s web presence, and intellectual property rights associated with resources presented through SAOA.
  • Preservation archive for long term storage
  • Project-oriented work, such as quality control and addressing questions regarding digitization and ingest
  • Strategic planning related to changing technologies and emerging infrastructure needs, for example, support for new formats/data here (images, data sets, archival material, etc.)

The Outreach Working Group contributes to the ongoing promotion of SAOA. It participates in shaping the vision of SAOA as the initiatve grows and develops over time. This includes:

  • Engaging with users and potential users around SAOA content
  • Considering sustainable methods of ongoing outreach
  • Developing workflows and messaging for social media engagement
  • Expanding and diversifying SAOA's user communities

Featured: Unique Urdu and Hindi Collection

Prof. Robert Phillips, lecturer for the Program in South Asian Studies at Princeton University, teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu and South Asian Studies, and has used both South Asia Materials Project (SAMP) and CRL resources to support different research, writing, and teaching projects.

Accessing Āmukha in SAMP’s holdings offered an opportunity to incorporate the crucial - but often less-collected - genre of the little magazine into his research on Hindi modernism and a subsequent conference presentation.