CUL - Main Content

As of October 1994, David Magier characterized SAG as "still in its infancy" and also promised additional forthcoming resources "created locally or by groups of South Asianists." 

By September 1996, the South Asia Gopher was transitioning into the web accessed version of SARAI, and had shifted from a period of "collection development" to "classification" and "annotation" stages of work. This was part of a broader Asian Studies Online Library project by the Association of Asian Studies' "fledging effort to coordinate evaluation, selection, classification and annotation of small select sets of 'peer reviewed' internet resources for inclusion" into what might approach the functionality of a library (see H-ASIA, September 4, 1996). A "preliminary peak at the (very) raw lists of S.Asia materials" Magier had been collecting for SARAI as of 1996 was available at David Magier's South Asia Bookmarks [only the banner remains at the archived site; the bookmarks themselves were shifted to newly launched SARAI]. On December 6, 1996 the South Asia Resource Access on the Internet (SARAI) site was announced on H-ASIA with url http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/area/sarai [banner image no longer archived; scroll down to see the links].

On August 15, 1997, the University of Chicago Library (in collaboration with Columbia University Libraries) submitted a two-year pilot project proposal to the Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) Global Resources Project (funded by the Mellon Foundation) which conceived the Digital South Asia Library(hosted at the University of Chicago) and SARAI (hosted at Columbia) as two complementary resources linked to other global participants in Madras, Hyderabad, and other locations. Jim Nye, Bibliographer for Southern Asia at the University of Chicago Library, and David Magier demonstrated this ARL South Asia Project at the October 1998 CONSALD meeting (Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation). In October 1999, United States Department of Education awarded the South Asia Project with $1 million in grants for three years ("South Asia Project Funded," American Libraries, 30(9), p. 36, October 1999).

At the October 2000 annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Magier led a workshop on "Navigating between the oases of the Internet: SARAI and beyond" (Indology, September 25, 2000). In the announcement for the SARAI demonstration session, Magier noted that SARAI has been in operation for 10 years and was "designated the official World Wide Web Virtual Library for South Asia." SARAI was recognized by the NEH as a "best of the humanities on the web" site as part of their EdSITEment humanities websites (created in late 1997 as a joint project of the NEH, the Council of the Great City Schools, MCI Communications Corp., and the National Trust for the Humanities). The url for South Asia Resource Access on the Internet was given as http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/southasia/cuvl/