Selection Guidelines

The Selection Guidelines, prepared by the Content Curation Working Group, help guide the evolution and expansion of SAOA’s curated collection, building on SAOA’s first Five-Year Plan, its five years of evolving collection development experience, and the FY21-25 Five-Year Plan. In our second five years we will broaden SAOA’s collection scope to incorporate additional themes, more coverage of under-represented geographic areas of South Asia, greater diversity of languages, communities, new resource types (such as audio/visual material, video, data sets, and maps), and wider date coverage (including post-colonial materials). With these criteria in mind, SAOA considers proposals submitted by anyone through its online suggestion form.

Themes

(The following themes are not mutually exclusive, due to their multidisciplinary scope.)

• Social, Economic and Political History
• Literature (including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism, literary history, and biographies)
• Women, Gender & Sexuality
• Caste, Tribes & Social Structure
• History of Science (including history of medicine)
• Art History (including history of architecture)

Resource Types

1. Official publications from colonial British India
   • Census reports, both before and after independence (SAOA has already digitized the decennial reports from 1871 to 1951, and plans to fill in gaps.)
   • Statistical reports, such as those on agriculture, land revenue and settlement, trade, commerce, and sanitation
   • Annual reports of departments for Presidencies and Princely States including India Office Collection categories (V/10, V/17, V/24, V/26)
   • Gazetteers, including publications at the provincial and district levels:
     • Imperial Gazetteer of India Provincial Series
     • Regional Gazetteers of Presidencies and Princely States
2. Resources from colonial Ceylon and Nepal
3. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century serials and newspapers
   • India Office Collections: V/6, V/16, V/25
   • Titles from bibliographies such as Macdonald's Union Catalogue and DSAL’s International Union List
   • Filling gaps in Native Newspaper Reports
   • Newspapers on trade, women, and revolutionary topics
4. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century monographs
   • Titles from the National Bibliography of Indian Literature, including MIPP microfilm
5. Audio and video resources (e.g., music performance, interviews, oral histories)
6. Visual resources (e.g., photographic archives, maps)
7. Data sets
8. Manuscript and archival collections
   • Examples: Muslim League papers, Indian National Congress papers, Sanskrit manuscript collections

Collection Development and Collaboration Considerations

• SAOA will strengthen current collections in key themes like Social & Economic History, Literature, Women & Gender, and Caste & Social Structure.
• SAOA applies its Selection Principles alongside these guidelines.
• Partners may include Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, and others worldwide.
• Additional considerations: collaboration agreements, subject/language/regional balance, and synergy with existing open-access efforts.