The National Library of Australia's Strategic Plan 1993-98, published in 1994, indicated an intention to strengthen acquisition of library materials from the Asia Pacific region and to delineate the scope of overseas collecting in terms of the Library's role in the Distributed National Collection.
The Library was therefore happy to accept, subject to availability of resources, carriage of resolution AA2 of the Third National Roundtable on Libraries and Asia held on 16 February 1995. This resolution recommended that the Library examine its current level of acquisitions from South Asia and consider strengthening this activity, in cooperation with other collecting institutions.
In fact, in Selection, Acquisitions and Serials Section, we had already begun to look at the success of our acquisitions program in South Asia and had recognised some deficiencies. In countries other than India, we were having little success acquiring monographs either by gift and exchange or purchase. The picture for serials was not quite so bleak, but still not as good as we should like. In addition, we wanted to achieve better coverage of Indian Central Government publications.
While, comparatively, we have been doing much better in India, there is still some room for improvement and, in particular, some of the gift and exchange relationships have not been reliable.
WE HAVE TAKEN TWO COURSES OF ACTION. Firstly, we reviewed our blanket orders, surveyed all the suppliers that we could identify in India and Pakistan and asked them for information according to a questionnaire. We did not arrive at a conclusive decision from this process, but it did provide us with a couple of options that will be investigated more thoroughly over the next 12 months.
To facilitate our investigations, a member of our Acquisitions staff who will be on recreation leave in India in January has agreed to be recalled to duty in order to visit in New Delhi the Library of Congress Acquisition Program Office and one of the strong contenders on our list of possible suppliers. She will also visit the Government Printing Office.
In the mean time, we have asked our existing Indian supplier to continue for the next 12 months and to extend the scope of the blanket order to government as well as commercial monographs from India, Bangladesh and Nepal. (We have separate blanket order arrangements with a supplier in Sri Lanka.)
In relation to Pakistan, we chose one of the two responding suppliers whom we had not already used for blanket orders and invited the company to supply government and commercial imprints on a trial basis for the next 12 months.
The second course of action that we adopted was to review the success of gift and exchange relationships with government agencies in the four countries in question. Where these were not operating successfully, a decision was made to close the exchange and to place subscriptions for the titles instead.
It will take some time for the effectiveness of these changes to become apparent. However, we hope to be in a position to report at least an improvement in the acquisition of publications from South Asia within 12 months.
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