The Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive (IPSOLHA) project emerged from a desire to make legal-historical sources (documents, reports, codes, compilations, etc.) related to the princely states of British Indian more accessible to scholars, students, and researchers around the world. With seed funding from a Digital Indian Learning Initiative grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies and institutional support from Dartmouth College, the project team began by working through publicly accessible and open library catalogs to cull relevant references.

At present the IPSOLHA database includes over 3,000 individual items, many of which are available in public and research libraries across North America.

In addition to identifying individual items, the project team also began to explore the possibility of indexing tables of contents for legal codes and legislative compendia. Beginning with accessible volumes like the Mysore Code, Acts and Proclamations of Cochin, and other multi-volume works, the team worked to make individuals acts, laws, and pieces of legislation visible to scholars working within and across the princely states.

In the future, scholars working in particular areas of law (labor and employment, drugs and alcohol, transportation and infrastructure, public health and safety, etc.) will be able to turn to IPSOLHA to figure out which states had relevant laws, when they were passed, and where to access the full text.

Following the completion of the pilot phase, the project team disbanded. At present, the project’s principal investigator (Elizabeth Lhost) is working to optimize the structure of the database to maximize users’ search and retrieval capabilities and is working with the South Asia Open Archives at the Center for Research Libraries to digitize and make openly accessible relevant primary source documents.