CONSALD (Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation) is organized as a committee of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. The primary objective of CONSALD is the development of North American library resources related to South Asia. The Committee shall facilitate library cooperation, collection development, bibliographic control, access, and preservation to benefit the use of South Asian research and teaching materials.
Through the South Asia Cooperative Collection Development Workshops, the community of South Asian library specialists in North America shares a collective vision of a seamless global collection of South Asian research resources to support and enhance scholarship. SACOOP makes concerted actions to broaden both the scope and depth of coverage of South Asian resources, spanning all subjects and formats.
The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA), a subset of the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP), creates and maintains a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia. This major collaborative initiative is aimed at addressing the current scarcity of digital resources pertinent to South Asian studies and at making collections more widely accessible both to North American scholars and to researchers worldwide. Suggest an archive or resource for digitization and ingest here.
Guided by the CRL Collection Development Policy, the South Asian Studies Collections Committee acquires research materials pertaining to South Asia, including but not limited to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives, South Asian studies, and other related fields of study, emphasizing but not limited to primary resource material from or about South Asia and/or in South Asian languages; promotes and facilitates the cooperative exchange of ideas and resources between research libraries related to this work; and works to improve access to South Asia and South Asian -language resources through licensing, digitization, and institutional connections.
The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) was created in 2000 to support its members' goals of preserving their library and archival collections, and making them available to researchers. The ReCAP facility consists of a preservation repository and resource sharing services, and is located on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus. ReCAP is jointly owned and operated by Columbia University, Harvard University, The New York Public Library and Princeton University. More than fifteen million items are currently in ReCAP's care and they are used to fulfill approximately 250,000 requests for materials each year, from its partners and from libraries around the world.