South Asia: Renovating the National Collection
Field Trip to India & Bangladesh, February 1997
On the Road to Bangalore / Royce Wiles and Erica Ryan
In February 1997 the project "South Asia: Renovating the National Collection" sent us with seven other Australian librarians on a month long trip to India and Bangladesh1. The immediate aims of the field trip were
- a systematic inquiry into a range of South Asian libraries
- institutional link building
- acquisition of, and access to, information resources, and
- establishing a network of Australian librarians familiar with South Asia.
The participants (details of the others on the trip are available at the URL given below) visited more than sixty institutions in India and Bangladesh. The structure of the visits was that in each of the cities visited - Mumbai (Bombay), Pune, Bangalore, Cennai (Madras), New Delhi, Calcutta, Dhaka - we first met with representatives of major libraries (often at a host centre) and then split up to visit individual institutions in groups or individually. At each institution we gathered information on contact details, collection strengths and policies, publications, details of access for researchers and where possible details of resources available through the internet, etc. Although this sounds simple there were often significant challenges to getting around these rather major South Asian cities as well as negotiating the protocol of visiting important institutions. Without exception we were given generous welcomes and many individuals went to great lengths to make our visits fruitful. The information gathered was entered into a (now well-travelled) laptop as we went and is currently being incorporated into a general field trip report to be released shortly, much of this information is also now available through the project webpage.
The range of libraries visited was considerable: national scientific libraries, institutes of development studies, social sciences, population research, the National Libraries of India and Bangladesh, the Library of Congress Field Office in New Delhi, centres for economic research, the National Archives in New Delhi and Dhaka, the Parliamentary Library in New Delhi, as well as smaller specialist libraries such as those for Tamil or Sanskrit. Many of the institutions now give internet addresses, in a few cases the full-text of institutional publications are also available on the web (eg. Reserve Bank of India). In each case we took as many particulars down as we could and the face-to-face contact with librarians was exceptionally useful for finding out the latest information, eg about the progress of INFLIBNET, roughly equivalent to AARNET here. In many cases we were able to visit prestigious national institutions which are difficult for individuals to enter, eg. in New Delhi the National Archives, the Parliamentary Library, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.
Although not primarily an acquisitions trip we did gather many kilos of publications and publication lists as well as details of videos, non main-stream publications, CD-ROM publications, etc. An important find was a source for microfilms of newspapers which are not available from the Library of Congress, viz the Nehru Museum in New Delhi. Details of the material gathered will also appear in the field trip report.
The differences between the libraries visited was vast. In some there was virtually no limit on the funds available for materials, particularly strong in this respect were the major research libraries with links to areas of national priority ie defence, economic reform. These libraries were often fully automated and had no cataloguing arrearages. Other libraries, including the National Library, were clearly struggling, while others were managing to hold their own. Of course it was not always possible for us on our visits, mostly only a few hours, to actually get to use these collections or perhaps even to form a totally accurate impression, but we have been able to increase significantly our knowledge about the institutions we visited.
Librarianship in South Asia does not have high status and in general is not well paid (an auto-rickshaw driver can earn three to four times the salary of a professional librarian). Library training varies from a syllabus that has not altered at all since 1964 (University of Calcutta) to places where young graduate librarians are guiding their institutions onto the web with considerable sophistication (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore). As yet internet access has not penetrated deeply into South Asia, there being only one or two service providers, but we were able to make use of a cyber-cafe in Bangalore and a streetside emailing centre in Calcutta ($A2 for 250 kilobytes).
The Indian book trade centres on New Delhi and Calcutta. One Saturday morning (from 8 am-2 pm) was spent visiting one of the largest suppliers, DK Agencies in suburban New Delhi. This firm is one of the most progressive and aggressively modernizing book suppliers in India, many of the visits to national institutions could only be arranged with their assistance. Their process of book procurement was more sophisticated and effective than that of the National Library of India and in fact, now that the Library of Congress New Delhi office has ceased to publish its Accessions List for South Asia (as of Dec. 1996) the DK catalogues (at least for material in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and Tibetan) will function as the de facto National Bibliography of India. We haven't heard of a book supplier anywhere who maintains authority files the way they do, even writing to authors to confirm dates of birth. Their web presence has now caused a number of other Indian suppliers to make web debuts.
We were not aware of the advances in India's own technological capability which now allow it not only to manufacture its own computer equipment but to develop sophisticated software to handle the sixteen official languages and their associated scripts (GIST), including indigenous library software packages. From the staff at the Library of Congress field office in New Delhi we learned of the increasing competition in the book trade in India: by advertising for supply of books by tender LC now receive considerable discounts on purchases which they pass on to their client libraries, Canada has an institute with a similar function.
It is tempting to say that the field trip shows that the commitment by Australian libraries to South Asia is maturing, but that may be premature. This was certainly the first such library delegation ever to visit South Asia from Australia, however the impetus for the project did not come from the Australian library community, it came from the vision of academics John McGuire (Curtin University) and Robin Jeffrey (La Trobe) and their deep concern about South Asian library resources in Australia, The field trip and the project's South Asia database launched by Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer, on 2 May 1997 are both major landmarks in the provision of library resources for South Asia in Australia.
Footnotes
- The background of this project was described by John McGuire in National Library of Australia News, October 1996, pp. 9-12.
This article was prepared after a presentation by Royce Wiles and Erica Ryan to a Canberra gathering (20 May 1997) of the Asia Pacific Special Interest Group (APSIG) of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA).
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