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Gregory Green
Gregory Green

Drew VandeCreek
Drew VandeCreek

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News Release

Contact: Tom Parisi, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-3635

August 29, 2005

NIU will lead international collaboration
in building virtual library on Southeast Asia

DeKalb, Ill. — The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) is awarding a grant of $780,000 over four years to Northern Illinois University Libraries, which will lead a consortium of institutions from across the world in the creation of an Internet-based digital library on Southeast Asia.

“By far, this is the largest grant that the library has ever received,” said University Libraries Dean Arthur Young. “We're proud to be heading up this collaborative effort. In many ways it's a natural fit for NIU, with our acclaimed Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the library's vast resources, which include a world-class Southeast Asian collection and a unit that specializes in digitization of materials for the Web.”

The Southeast Asia Digital Library is expected to debut online as a project in development early next year. It will give researchers, students and the general public free access to unique and rare materials related to Southeast Asian history, scholarship and contemporary culture.

The virtual library will focus on the countries of Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

“The initial goal of the project is to collect information from Southeast Asia that would otherwise be difficult for most researchers and students to access,” said Gregory Green, project co-director and curator of NIU Libraries' Southeast Asian Collection.

“Digitizing the materials provides worldwide access, promoting research and understanding,” he added. “Rather than travel the globe in search of these rare materials, researchers will be able to simply log onto the Internet.”

The virtual library's resources will include:

  • Rare early-printed works in the languages of the region.
  • Historical photographs covering a century of life in Cambodia. The archive is being developed by NIU anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood and NIU political scientist Kheang Un.
  • A video archive of a currently influential television news program in Indonesia.
  • A video archive, known as the Living Memory Project, with interviews of former political prisoners in East Timor.
  • Digitized images of rare and fragile palm-leaf manuscripts from northeastern Thailand. Palm leaves were used for centuries throughout much of Southeast Asia as a writing material to record Buddhist scriptures, law and literature.

Dwight King, director of the NIU Center for Southeast Asian Studies, said the new virtual library will be a valuable resource at a time when the study of the region is critically important.

“Southeast Asia is becoming a major player on the world's stage,” King said. “ Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim-majority country. A Thai representative is the current secretary-general of the World Trade Organization. The Philippines and Thailand have contributed forces to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Also, for several decades, the rates of economic growth, industrialization, urbanization and globalization in Southeast Asia have outpaced those of other parts of the world.”

Top U.S. centers on the study of Southeast Asia will provide support for the Southeast Asia Digital Library. Participating institutions include the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, Cornell University, Harvard University and Yale University. Additionally, the project will rely on international partners, including the Philippines University of San Carlos and Thailand's Khon Kaen University and Thammasat University.

“Eventually this project will bring together and build upon resources from many existing projects at NIU and other institutions,” Green said. “We want the Southeast Asia Digital Library to be a central access point to as many Southeast Asian resources as possible.”

The grant is being distributed through the DOE's Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access Program. It supports projects that use innovative electronic technologies to collect information from foreign sources.

Online digitization projects reach audiences inside and outside of academe. In its simplest terms, the digitization process requires scanning or photographing artifacts and research documents. Special software is used to put text into searchable word-processing files and to catalogue materials, which are then loaded into databases on the Web site.

NIU Libraries digitization unit, headed by Drew VandeCreek, has an impressive resume of digitization projects that have attracted $2.3 million in external funding over the last 7 ½ years (including the most recent DOE grant).

“Most of our digitization projects involve partners from other institutions, but this will be our largest and first international collaboration,” said VandeCreek, who will serve as co-director of the Southeast Asia Digital Library project. “We also expect that, in terms of video provided for the Web, this could be the largest-scale project we've ever been involved in.”

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