South Asia Archive has received the prestigious 2022 Reader’s Choice Award for Most Improved Product from The Charleston Advisor. 

South Asia Archive is a major collection of over 4.5 million pages of books, journals, census reports, film pamphlets, and other formats originally published in the Indian subcontinent between 1700 and the middle of the twentieth century. Previously offered by Taylor & Francis, the collection was acquired by Coherent Digital in June 2022, and the content is now available exclusively from Coherent on its award-winning Commons platform.

In announcing the award, The Charleston Advisor praised Coherent’s “excellent platform with new functionality and tools.” It recommended, “If your library has a need for materials in this important part of the world, this offering is a must have for a one-time purchase with perpetual rights.”

The newly developed Commons platform has a suite of tools with innovative features.  Users can upload files quickly and make them available to other users, create automatic summaries, extract CSV files from tables, enhance metadata, and otherwise enrich the archive. The platform is the engine behind Policy Commons, Mindscape Commons, Africa Commons, and other Coherent databases. 

Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President at Coherent Digital, said, “We’re honored to be recognized by The Charleston Advisor with this award. South Asia is home to about a quarter of the world’s people, and this project helps bring their perspective into academic study across many disciplines.”

About Coherent Digital

Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. Today, the scholarly record is incomplete, missing critical research materials that are currently wild—undiscoverable, uncatalogued, uncitable, and unstable. At Coherent Digital, we curate, capture, enrich, and make wild content available to scholars on our award-winning Commons platforms. We focus on grey literature, regional content, primary sources, and learning objects.