Online Research Resources for South Asian History

Abstract

Because so much of South Asia’s archival and primary source materials as well as precolonial and colonial-era published sources traditionally referred to by historians reside in physical archives and libraries that are difficult to access, the work of individual historians until recently had often been limited to resources they could access only from significant collections outside of South Asia, such as those at the British Library and at some major US research libraries. Research travel to South Asia to consult domestic collections there has always been expensive, impractical, and too often an exceedingly challenging endeavor because of the local limitations on access. But with the growth of the internet since the 1990s, and the relative ease of putting materials online, there has been an explosion of small- and large-scale efforts at digitization and online publishing of more unique and previously inaccessible treasures from South Asia. As of the early 2000s, a wealth of valuable open-access as well as commercially produced and distributed content is available online to scholars of South Asian history. However, this profusion itself has created new challenges. The lack of selectivity, peer review, or other quality evaluations for much internet publishing, the dearth of standards for long-term website continuity and presentation, the absence of centralized pathways for structured discovery of these resources, the bewildering array of user interfaces, the increasing monetization of online access to primary source content, and the inadequate attention to digital preservation all make this universe of digital content a far from ideal setting for historical research. To enable historians more effectively to identify authoritative online sources that meet their research needs and how to access them, collaborative endeavors by South Asia librarians and academic institutions are beginning to yield useful results and to create orderly oases in the general chaos of the internet.