New Resource on Sri Lanka from AISLS
November 19, 2019
The American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies announced the open-access online publication of 42 issues (1939-1940) of the Star of Islam, a weekly newspaper published in Colombo. These are available through the South Asia Open Archives on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/site/
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 Asia studies and at making collections more widely accessible both to North American scholars and to researchers worldwide.
For a general account of the Star of Islam, see Ramla Wahab-Salman's article "Reading the Star of Islam," published by Himal Southasian on 17 July 2019.
This AISLS project builds on the earlier work of Ronit Ricci in documenting and making available an extensive collection of Malay language print and manuscript materials from Sri Lanka. The images from her project, funded through the British Library's Endangered Archives program, are available on open-access at https://eap.bl.uk/project/