University of Chicago Receives $83,000 Grant From British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme

Digitzed images from the project will be made available to HathiTrust and others.
From U. of Chicago Library News:

The University of Chicago has been awarded a £52,247 [$83,720] grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, funded by Arcadia, for the digitization and preservation of 60 rare and endangered Urdu language periodicals. With the grant, digital images of magazines and journals will be produced at the Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre in Karachi, Pakistan, and made available through the University of Chicago Library and the British Library, giving scholars access to a significant archive of the most important Urdu periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Urdu was the lingua franca in much of the subcontinent during the 19th century and Urdu periodicals provide abroad spectrum of writings on a range of important issues in South Asia through the 19th and 20th centuries, making their preservation invaluable for scholars of the language and the region.
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The Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre, which is owned and managed by the University of Chicago Library on behalf of a consortium of U.S. research libraries, houses one of the finest collections of Urdu periodicals in the world, making it an ideal location for the project. James Nye, University of Chicago Library Bibliographer for Southern Asia and Principal Investigator for the project, acquired the collection for the consortium. He noted that “this project is a testament to what is possible through the University’s collaboration with our colleagues in Pakistan and India. The teamwork will benefit scholars around the world through free access to invaluable primary research resources.”
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Digital images will be archived by the British Library and the University of Chicago Library, and disseminated via the Digital South Asia Library and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Digital and paper copies of the periodicals will be cataloged and made visible via OCLC’s WorldCat and the South Asia Union Catalogue.

Read the Complete Announcement

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