The South Asia Archive holds 5 million pages of primary and secondary material from novels, film posters, religious tracts, census reports, government acts and journal publications ranging roughly from the early 18th century to the early 1950s. Although a majority of the material is in English, there is much in Bengali, and some in Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and other South Asian languages. Most of the material pertains to India, with some on Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, Tibet and other neighbouring countries.

The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA), a subset of the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP), creates and maintains a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia. This major collaborative initiative is aimed at addressing the current scarcity of digital resources pertinent to South Asia studies and at making collections more widely accessible both to North American scholars and to researchers worldwide.