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Gateway to the Subcontinent: The Digital South Asia Library
From: University of Chicago
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 old imports into Bombay in 1841. Post-war photos of Burmese pagodas. Readings in Urdu Prose and Poetry. |
That's only a fraction of what you'll find at the Digital South Asia Library (dsal.uchicago.edu), a project based at the Center for Research Libraries and supported by universities, libraries and research centers on three continents, including the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the British Library, and the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai. DSAL's mission is to compile and make available an array of historical, bibliographical, linguistic, and statistical data on South Asia. |
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| Temple scene from the Hensley Photo Library. Hensley's note reads, "I picked up a Buddha head from among the debris on the floor, mounted it on a piece of wood and have it on my desk before me now." | |
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The site includes a broad range of materials and offers powerful search capabilities. When complete, DSAL will provide easy access to a trove of historical documents, pedagogical aids, government publications, journals, and statistical data for educators, researchers, business leaders, and others around the world. Already available is the Hensley Photo Library, a collection of 600 photos taken by American serviceman Glenn S. Hensley in 1944-45. The images capture life during wartime in British India and Burma, and include street scenes, portraits and images of temples--along with transcriptions of Hensley's handwritten notes on each photo. |
DSAL is leading an effort to digitize 250,000 photos from the archives of the British Oriental and India Office, as well as a catalog of 9,500 previously unrecorded books in the British Library's collection. Other digitization efforts cover 180,000 images from the American Institute of Indian Studies and a collection of nineteenth-century photographs from the Madras College of Arts and Crafts. DSAL plans to offer a searchable database of rare historical maps as well as topographical maps of the subcontinent, including the 23,000 map records of the Oriental and India Office, which at present are not available in any electronic format. |
Teaching tools on DSAL include a searchable Hobson-Jobson Anglo Indian Dictionary, published in 1903, plus introductory texts in Bengali and Urdu and primers in Telugu, Oriya and Grantha characters. A robust bibliography section includes tools for searching American, British, and Indian collections of manuscripts, monographs, government publications, and other texts from colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Work is underway to create upwards of 40 digital dictionaries as part of the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project. |
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