Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries and Coherent Digital expand coverage of the Global South

Today, the libraries of Big Ten Academic Alliance confirmed the purchase of three additional modules of Africa Commons, a large-scale, multiyear project to digitize, disseminate, and discover African cultural materials, building on their 2022 founding-member purchase of the first module, African History and Culture. In addition, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has been named a founding member of South Asia Commons. 

The purchase included Southern African Films and Documentaries; Black South African Magazines; and East African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films, which were developed by Coherent in collaboration with the Hilary Ng’weno family, Digital Divide Data, and Moi University in Kenya. BTAA’s support will help sustain the Hilary Ng’weno archive in Kenya and fund the digitization of additional content.     

The consortium also purchased South Asian History and Culture, an index and preservation initiative with more than 500 organizations, 2,000 collections, and 500,000 documents pertaining to South Asia from 1500 to the present. An esteemed South Asian team of editors has helped guide the project’s development.

Coherent’s President, Stephen Rhind-Tutt, said, “Twenty months ago the BTAA libraries made a significant commitment that enabled Africa Commons to grow more quickly. Today’s purchase will help us do the same for South Asia Commons. Both regions are underrepresented in Western library collections. BTAA’s support will allow us to accelerate the growth of the initiatives and thereby help libraries remedy these gaps.”

Coherent offers free access to East African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films for African institutions and HBCUs. South Asian History and Culture is made free to institutions in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Participating organizations like the Big Ten Academic Alliance support this free access. 

Maurice York, Director of Library Initiatives for BTAA, emphasized his deep commitment to the collaboration and collective action that define the Big Ten Academic Alliance. “This acquisition reflects our libraries’ ability to work together to acquire a major resource that will benefit programs at every campus. We look forward to supporting and helping grow this important effort.”

Affiliates at BTAA institutions can access the content immediately.

About Coherent Digital
Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. We find important content and make it useful—so researchers can do their work, educators can teach, scholars can publish, and organizations can disseminate their knowledge to a global audience. Through Coherent, information is saved, uniquely tagged, stabilized, and made discoverable. 

About the Big Ten Academic Alliance

The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the provosts of the universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters. The fifteen world-class libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance include Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago.

Big Ten Academic Alliance Snapshot 

Big Ten Academic AllianceFact Sheet