A professor hands out the final assignment: a 15-page paper on Southeast Asia. Students become tense and wonder how they will find information on a region so far away.

This year, NIU received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that will allow the creation of a digital library on Southeast Asia to be available through Internet sites hosted by NIU.

The project will be directed by University Libraries members Gregory Green, curator for the Southeast Asia collection, and Drew VandeCreek, director of digital projects. Green expects the library to be available to the public early next year.

“Over the four years of the project there will be an increasing amount of content available on the site each year,” Green said.

The first goal for the project is the digital archiving of palm-leaf manuscripts from Thailand, historical photographs from Cambodia, an influential television program from Indonesia, interviews with former political prisoners from East Timor and rare works in the vernacular languages of the region. Partners involved in the process include members of the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia, and institutions in Thailand, the Philippines and East Timor.

Over the next four years, the project will receive $195,000 each year through the Technological Innovation for Foreign Information Access program. This program, created by the education department, aims to compile information from foreign countries and make it accessible in America.

VandeCreek said the digital library will solve problems regarding the distance and the cost of obtaining information.

“This is going to make it much more available to a much broader range of people,” VandeCreek said.

In addition to the archives, the preliminary plans also include seminars to train librarians in the Philippines in the latest techniques in preservation, conservation and digitization.

Aiming beyond the current plans, Green said a national advisory board of librarians and representatives will meet at the Association for Asian Studies conference in San Francisco next year to measure progress, including the possibility of extending the project beyond the four-year term of the grant.

As for what will be considered next, the horizons are broad. History department chair Kenton Clymer said the current collection on Southeast Asia is remarkable.

Additionally, Katie Hale, a Southeast Asian Studies graduate student, said, “Anything that is related to Cambodia is welcome, since the literature about the country and its culture is sparse to begin with.”

For more information on the Southeast Asia digital library project, contact Gregory Green at [email protected] or Drew VandeCreek at [email protected].