Northern Illinois University Libraries, along with a consortium of U.S. institutions represented by CORMOSEA and several international partners have recently won a grant from the US Department of Education to create the Southeast Asia Digital Library. The Digital Library will provide access to research materials, bibliographic indexes, and support a wide range of research and teaching activities. To enhance interoperability between area studies digital libraries, the project is based on the model established by the Digital South Asia Library. It will employ standards developed and approved by American and international library organizations to provide free access to archives of textual, still image, sound, and video resources, covering both historical and current information from the region.
A number of constituent projects will create content and provide services for the Digital Library. Projects include:
Acting in concert with partners in the region, individuals representing leading Southeast Asian Studies programs at US universities will coordinate these projects. This effort will enable these programs to use available resources more efficiently by establishing a cooperative digital library rather than constructing unconnected pieces. The Digital Library will amass substantial resources from Southeast Asia and provide free access for students, teachers, scholars, government officials, and many others with interest in the region.
Funding for the project began in October 2005 and is anticipated to continue for four years from that time. More information will be available as the project website is brought online in the next few months. For more information on the grant program see the US Department of Education's Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access website.
Cambodian Genocide Project
The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale.
Since 1994, the Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Cambodian Genocide Program at the
Yale Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events
to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was
responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance,
we obtained access to the 50,000-page archive of that defunct regime's security
police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University's
Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of December 2002,
we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records,
and over 6,000 photographs, documents, translations, and maps, along with an extensive
list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide.
The Southeast Asian Microform Project of the Center for Research Libraries has provided funding and other support in
the Santebal archive microfilming project.
Thai Journal Index
The Thai Journal Indexing Project, based at UW Libraries, is part of a cooperative
initiative of the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (a sub committee of
the Association for Asian Studies) to strengthen access to vernacular journal literature
from Southeast Asia.
Other libraries cooperating with this project are: the Technical Information Access
Center in Bangkok, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the Center for Research
Libraries in Chicago.
This database will allow researchers to read enough of the article
in the Thai script to determine if they wish to request a copy through interlibrary borrowing.
There is currently no access in North American libraries to Thai journal indexing.