Web Site of South Asian Publications in the UK

Citation

Blake, M. (2004), "Web Site of South Asian Publications in the UK", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2004.26322bag.004

Web Site of South Asian Publications in the UK

Web Site of South Asian Publications in the UKhttp://saalg.org

Academics and enthusiasts studying South Asia now have a comprehensive Web-based archive containing details of the essential publications and periodicals on the region that are held in UK libraries. The resource was created as part of South Asia Through Official Eyes (SATOE, http://saalg.org) and has been developed using the unique content management system ToadHMS from Oxford ArchDigital.

The SATOE Web site is led by University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Dr Gillian Evison of the Bodleian Library’s Indian Institute says of the project: “Oxford ArchDigital helped us to make difficult material more accessible to a scholarly audience with a user-friendly interface at a price we could afford”.

The SATOE archive contains records submitted by 80 different libraries in the UK and has a variety of innovative search tools. It is one of the first of its kind to include the ToadMap mapping engine which allows users to click on a map of India to find all publications related to a particular state or district. ToadMap is also used as a spatial interface to the complex geographic changes in state and district boundaries since 1947, allowing users to see these changes by simply clicking on the map. “Creating this function involved digitizing an enormous amount of maps”, says Oxford ArchDigital’s managing director Nick Case. “We then devised a way of “time slicing” the data to reflect changes to the map of India.”

More conventional search functions throughout the site are simple and intuitive; the archive may be searched on different criteria with either a Quick or Advanced search, or users can browse around the publications and libraries using the straightforward menu which is consistently at the left of the screen.

SATOE is a British Library co-operation and Partnership Programme Project for which the lead site is provided by the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Additional funding has been provided by the Research Support Libraries Programme. The project was initiated as a way of providing easy access to information about acquisition policies for post-independence South Asian official publications. It is addressing the implications for collection development decisions in this field, such as duplication and gaps in the national collection and intends to develop a co-ordinated collection policy in order to counter the trend of libraries making purchasing decisions in isolation.

The publications included in the archive are essential sources for the study of the region, as well as international humanities and social sciences. Included are a union list of South Asian post-independence serial official publications held by UK libraries, and a list of South Asian periodicals in UK libraries which has been created by the South Asia Archive and Library Group.