Staff Papers

Building Bridges: Strategies for Buying Books from Southeast Asia

Paper by Amelia Mckenzie, National Library of Australia, Regional Officer, Asia, presented at the Southeast Asia Resources Planning Pre-CONSAL X Meeting, Kuala Lumpur, 18-20 May 1996


In this paper I briefly discuss the experiences of the eNational Library of Australia in obtaining SE Asian research materials, and provide information on how one group of Australian libraries approaches the practical difficulties of building SE Asian collections.

Australian librarians and researchers have exactly the same problems as our US colleagues in obtaining SE Asian materials, and for the same reasons. I don't propose to repeat here what is very well known to all of us. We all use the same suppliers, agents or programmes and we all share the same experiences, successes and failures. Australia's relatively close geographical proximity to the region does not change this. With the possible exception of our colleagues at NTU in Darwin, mainland SE Asia is far enough away from the major eastern state collections in Australia to make acquisitions work difficult and expensive for these institutions.

The National Library of Australia's Indonesian Acquisitions Programme in Jakarta was established in 1971 to overcome the difficulties of acquiring Indonesian materials and to start to build the Library's Indonesian collections, bringing to three the number of foreign agencies collecting library materials in Jakarta (the Americans, the Dutch and the Australians). Jakarta is the NLA's only overseas office. This article will not give a lengthy history or description of the NLA's collecting activities, discuss likely future developments and highlight a few of the issues that face us when we go about our acquisitions activities in the region, and in Indonesia in particular.

The acquisition of materials from Southeast Asia has always been problematic for the National Library. It has often lacked subject and language expertise for mainland Southeast Asia, with specialist staff being concentrated on Chinese, Japanese, Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, where the Library's collections excel. In addition, acquisitions staff struggled to find suppliers from the region who were able to run approval plans / blanket orders on the Library's behalf, which would have solved resource problem at home. As a result the decision was made only about five years ago to join the LC Cooperative Acquisitions Programme for Southeast Asia. An important element of this arrangement was that materials acquired through the programme are shipped to Australia via the Regional Office in Jakarta.

Through the Library's Indonesian Regional Office, it turns from being a member of a co-operative acquisitions programme to being the provider of one to a group of five participating libraries - four Australian university libraries and our colleagues at the National Library of Singapore. The office has a staff of three, an Australian and two local staff, and premises in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. The Library's Regional Officer is attached to the Embassy and its administrative services are used to process consignments. The subject profiles operated for participants are different, but similar enough not to require extensive hunting around to meet extra requirements, so staff resources are sufficient to meet current needs.

To summarise, the National Library's acquisitions program is tightly focused, and compared to Library of Congress for example, selective where both its own collecting and that for participants is concerned. Books are shipped to the Library in Canberra via air freight every three months, and three participants' materials are forwarded on from Canberra. All new acquisitions are listed in the quarterly Indonesian Acquisitions List, which is generated from the Regional office database. Participants pay for the cost of the materials, shipping and an administrative charge. Keywords in running the programme and the office are simplicity and cost-effectiveness - the single Australian in charge simply doesn't have the resources to embark on large new projects or offer elaborate options to participants. When the Regional Officer evaluated small library systems suitable for automating office operations she chose a system that has a very user-friendly USMARC-based cataloguing module and installed it on a stand-alone PC - in an office of three an expensive file server was not necessary. Howver an advanced tape back-up unit that backs up to cartridges, not disks, was chosen, to facilitate the process for all office staff. Although the automation of serials remains a priority, the implementation of the serials check-in module is being reassessed, because the predictive system used is complicated and unsympathetic to the publication patterns of many of the Indonesian titles received.

Shipping books out of Indonesia is one of the major issues in managing acquisitions from the country. Dealing with the bureaucracy surrounding the despatch of large numbers of books is a headache, whether it's at the post office or the customs barrier. The Australian acquisitions program has limited access to the Australian government diplomatic mail system, restricted to daily newspapers and small numbers of books, and there is no service equivalent to the US military's APO, which the Library of Congress uses. The only option for sending out regular consignments, which run to about 1000 kilos per quarter (say sixty boxes) is to use commercial air freight services. Before books can be shipped, the acquisitions office must obtain an export permit from the Indonesian authorities for every consignment we send. This involves the following steps:

  1. submit a list of the titles to be sent to the Indonesian Attorney-General's Department;
  2. A-G's scrutinises and approves our list;
  3. the letter of approval is submitted to the Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs;
  4. Foreign Affairs issues an export permit;
  5. the shipment is cleared through Customs. Acquisitions office staff go through this procedure every three months.

However, the rapidly developing Indonesian economy recently threw up a solution to this problem, in the form of an US-based freight service which recently opened a Jakarta office. The acquisitions office has been trialling air courier direct delivery for its participants in Darwin and Singapore, where it was impractical to consign materials to Canberra. The number of titles involved was also relatively small - shipments of 30 to 50 kilos every three months or so, and the courier company took responsibility for customs clearance. The extra cost of this freight service was offset by the resources saved in handling and administration, and the savings were passed on to the two libraries by a reduction in the admininstrative charge. After a year's trial the office will offer the service to all of its participants.

The NLA's Indonesian office serves a core group of Australian libraries currently developing Indonesian collections. However there are many other Australian libraries not in the programme who acquire materials from Indonesia. All of them use the standard methods to do this: buying through Australian dealers; ordering direct from those Indonesian publishers or agents who can handle overseas orders; using gift and exchange arrangements; asking their faculty to purchase for them when they're on field trips; and making their own buying trips. All of these methods will be familiar to acquisitions librarians, and the Regional Officer frequently advises Australian and New Zealand librarians, booksellers and researchers of the range of options available in buying Indonesian materials. This highlights an important and perhaps unique development in Australia - interest in Indonesian materials is broadening and diversifying, away from just scholarly research to include public libraries who wish to serve their Indonesian reading public; school libraries, involved in Indonesian language and culture teaching programs; Australian private sector companies doing business in Indonesia - law firms, for example; and general interest book retailers who are attempting to serve these markets.

Long-term, the Library does not necessarily see it as the Regional Office's role to develop and serve this growing market in Australia for Indonesian books. It is a question of both resources (which are limited) and strategy. The Regional Office is not a de facto commercial library supplier for Indonesian library materials, no matter how much we desire to build bridges between Australian library collections and Indonesian publishers. It is the Office's role to build the Library's collections, especially in the areas of non-commercial materials, government publications, maps, primary source, 'hard to get' materials which are not available any other way.

What the Regional Office would rather do is encourage Australians to persist in making direct demands of the Indonesian book trade, in the hope that the industry will respond to the demands and develop a viable service for overseas customers, and that (even better) some enterprising person will set up a dedicated overseas library supply company. It may well be the case that in many of the countries of our region there is room in the market for local suppliers to serve an overseas market with commercially produced titles, and for the occasional foreign agency to have its office collect non-mainstream, 'hard to get' materials - the sort of items that offer no profit margin to commercial library suppliers. I also believe that the solution to acquisitions from some countries in the Asia-Pacific region lies within those countries themselves, in the development of a flourishing local book trade - something that we must hope for and do all we can to bring about.


Last updated 24 December 1996

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