Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (Re: Choad/Chode)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   FYI:  Take a look at this, at Columbia University's site.  It will get
better.


U.S. Department of Education Grants $530K to Phase Two of the Digital
Dictionaries of South Asia Library Project (DDSA)

(NEW YORK, August 27, 2003) Columbia University Libraries, the University of
Chicago Library, and North Carolina State University have recently received
$530K in funding from the U.S. Department of Education, with the University of
Chicago as the leader.

The new three-year grant will be used for the second phase of the Digital
Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) project. The project will add at least ten
monolingual dictionaries for modern literary languages of South Asia to its web
site at <A HREF="http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/">http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/</A>. These additions will complement
the thirty-four bilingual dictionaries already being made available under the
project's first phase.

The DDSA was initiated by Columbia's South Asia Librarian and Director of
Area Studies Dr. David Magier, in collaboration with the University of Chicago.
It was developed under major Department of Education funding, as part of the
Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) project - a successful ten year
Columbia/Chicago effort to secure funding for free online access to full-text documents,
image and photo archives, journals indexes, statistics, maps, and other vital
resources for the study of South Asia. The DSAL is online at <A HREF="http://dsal.uchicago.edu/">
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/</A>. Through DSAL, students, scholars, teachers, business leaders, public
officials and citizens have been able to locate and utilize via the internet
materials concerning South Asia that are not otherwise accessible in the U.S.

In 2002, Magier and colleagues created the Center for South Asia Libraries,
an independent international non-profit corporation with offices in Chicago,
India and Nepal to centralize support for these projects. Magier works with the
offices and partners of CSAL in India to carry out the extensive data entry
for the dictionaries project, which has received publicity in the Indian
subcontinent because of the way it highlights many of the languages of the region and
makes their dictionaries more accessible. "The Digital Dictionaries project
has caught a lot of attention, because of the balance it strikes between the
interests of dictionary publishers, copyright holders, and the public - in the
West and in South Asia," says Magier. "By carrying out this work through CSAL,
and providing support for sister institutions in the Indian Subcontinent, we
demonstrate the value of international collaboration in tackling preservation
and access challenges that could not be addressed otherwise." The grant from
the Department of Education also enhances the likelihood that partner libraries
in the countries of South Asia will also attract support from governments and
foundations in the region.

Columbia University Libraries is one of the top ten academic library systems
in the nation, with 7.5 million volumes, over 50,000 serials, as well as
extensive collections of electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms
and other non-print formats.