south asian studies

The Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, is digitizing its archive of oral history and other sound collections, and they are now appearing online with free access.  Hat tip to the South Asia and Archive Group blog which posted the following review of the CSAS collection:

Emory has just licensed access to the India, Raj, and Empire online collection of manuscripts from the National Library of Scotland documenting the history of British in India from the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 to the granting of independence for India and Pakistan in 1947.  Sources include papers of key East India Company representatives and colonial officials as well as records of daily life in Agra, Bombay, Lahore, and Madras.

Emory is a member of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) which gives our users access to unique materials not available at other libraries.  Many of our "libguides" point to resources in specific areas.  The winter issue of CRL's Focus newsletter has an article on South Asian Music resources at CRL by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Assistant Professor of Music, Colorado College.

Google Earth has never been given access to GOI (Government Of India) data, so its usefulness for South Asian studies has been somewhat impaired, although Google has welcomed local user generated content as highlighted in its Maplandia site which makes it somewhat more useful, for example, to orient study abroad students.  The Indian government's system, Bhuvan, was released in fall of 2009 and offers many of the same functionality as Google Earth but with emphasis on the subcontinent and with some government data built in --

The "National Library, India" in Calcutta has announced a project to digitize rare, old material.  If implemented successfully and made accessible to scholars around the world, this material would have a significant impact on teaching and research about India.  Other digitization efforts

Google announced on December 17, 2009 an online transliteration tool that enables users to type phonetically in Roman characters to generate vernacular scripts in the following languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.  This tool is embedded in Google products like gmail, but they have also provided bookmarklets for each language that let you type in any text box on any web site.