Oct 9, 2025, 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CT
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Decolonizing South Asian Collections via Collective Purchasing and Digitization Projects
In the last decade, South Asian Studies Librarians have worked to decolonize libraries in western and global northern libraries, especially in North America. Several very exciting organizations have been founded, in order to keep materials in South Asia and to allow South Asians to access materials without cost. In this talk, I will discuss the ways in which we invest money in digitization efforts to make materials that may have deteriorated or been destroyed in various libraries in South Asia, as well as purchasing libraries from South Asia, digitizing them, and finding new homes for them in South Asia, so that they are not made inaccessible to students and scholars nearby. I also discuss different ways that students and scholars all over the world can access and utilize materials from anywhere, including UW-Madison to conduct their research.
About the Speaker:
Todd Michelson-Ambelang is Senior Academic Librarian at Memorial Library, where he works as International and Area Studies Librarian for South Asian Studies and Scandinavian Studies, as well as selector for History of Science and the ADA Accessibility Liaison for Public Services. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with an MA and PhD in Scandinavian Philology and an MA in Library and Information Studies. His research interests include researching outsiders in Icelandic Sagas and Accessibility Issues for people with disabilities and people from the Global South. This academic year, he is on partial leave in Germany, where he has received a post-doc from the German Literary Archives in Marbach, where he is looking into the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke’s time in Scandinavia, as well as looking at disability in German literature.