Abstract from DSAL Preservation Project Grant Proposal

This project creates a significant new and previously unavailable corpus of digital materials that will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines in the humanities, particularly those students, scholars and researchers interested in doing groundbreaking work in the emerging field of digital humanities. By making available a combined total of over 24,000 early audio recordings, survey maps and postcards from the British India, this project will immediately greatly expand the scope of available historical resources from the Indian subcontinent. It will also nicely complement resources currently available through the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia Library (DSAL), which include over 100,000 photographic images, statistical abstracts, books and journals, dictionaries, and a myriad of other reference resources. DSAL provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, students, public officials, business leaders, and other users and is the most significant central repository of digital reference materials on South Asia.

The Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) places utmost importance on making its resources available to the public for the long term. By ensuring that the collection, preservation and presentation of these newly digitized materials is compliant with the most recent standards and accepted practices and that DSAL has a well-articulated and coherent long-term preservation strategy, we will make certain that DSAL digital resources are available for the long term. The work plan, methodology and standards adopted for the ingestation, migration, preservation and presentation of the over 24,000 early audio recordings, survey maps and postcards funded through this grant will be extended to the entirety of the DSAL digital collection.

The primary objective of this project is to present these materials to a diverse community of teachers, researchers, and students with a shared interest South Asian studies and to provide a framework for the long term preservation of this materials. This will be accomplished through delivering these materials through the World Wide Web and assembling a structure of bibliographic descriptions and supplementary resources to provide the context necessary for understanding these materials. It is our objective that this will provide for both the physical and intellectual access to these materials. This access will be provided for by making use of existing frameworks within the University of Chicago and unique frameworks that will be developed during the period of the grant. Because of this, the approach developed during the course of the grant will allow for the long term access and preservation of these materials, beyond the initial grant period.

(Full Grant Proposal available in Kent R. Palmer curriculum vitae.)