The impetus to prepare electronic texts of devotional hymns came out of the interest of a dedicated group of individuals of Indian origin living in St. John's in Canada, who had no previous exposure to scriptures, but were keen to learn. A selected set of commonly chanted Stôtrā-s was initially put together in Tamil and Telugu, for the benefit of this group. Nominal tutoring was provided and the project was very successful.

The scope of the compilation was subsequently enlarged to cover a broader range of Stôtrā-s and Mantrā-s.

The texts were first archived on the Internet in Tamil and Telugu scripts in March 1996 and the compilation has been gradually growing.

Earlier versions of the Sanskrit pages were initially built with Arun Gupta's TrueType Dêvanāgarī font Xdvng for Windows, and Sandeep Sibal's Jtrans , and later, Itranslator with Sanskrit New and Sanskrit98 fonts . With the availability of language software like BARAHA and the ease of conversion of multilingual texts, the bulk of the Archive is now in BARAHA fonts and format.

Periodic upgrades to Windows operating system and browsers has necessitated frequent format changes to old HTML files in Indian Languages.

To avoid the need for frequent revisions or inconvenience to viewers due to changing standards, the entire Stôtra collection has now been converted and archived here in PDF format.