Except for Cornell and LC, very few members of SEAM subscribe to newspapers from Southeast Asia and rely mostly on Press Display, Factiva, etc or going directly to the websites of these titles. This leaves US scholars without a basic historical record from the region. This proposal will ease our budget, preserve and allow researchers to access newspapers.
This two year experiment whereby SEAM will pay and subscribe to newspaper titles from Southeast Asia through the Library of Congress Jakarta that will ship collated issues to CRL for microfilming using SEAM workflow. All microfilmed copies can be accessed through CRL.
The titles include: Indonesia (Jakarta Post, Kompas); Malaysia (New Straits Times, Berita Harian); Thailand (Bangkok Post, Matichon sutsapda); Vietnam (Nhan Dan, VN News); Burma (New Light of Myanmar). The above titles will be collected, collated, and prepared for microfilming, then sent to Backstage for microfilming and then to CRL for cataloging and storage. This would ensure that SEAM will have a preservation copy in the United States.
SEAM members can expect the microfilm reels to be available about one year after each subscription year. After two years of this project SEAM is expected to revisit the project.