Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation
Minutes of the Meeting
March 26, 1998. Washington, DC

2. Report from LC by Lygia Ballantyne

The South Asia Bibliographer, as successor to the South Asia Accessions list, is being published by Sage. In addition to basic bibliographic information, the LCCN is included but profile numbers are not.

The New Delhi Field Office hopes to have a webpage ready by April. They welcome suggestions. It will include a list of currently filmed materials from Delhi, last issued filmed etc. and contents of fiched collections. The Indian Publication Project is linked via Chicago. The Serials list is still at Chicago but it could be hosted at Delhi for live updates. The webpage will include a list of participants which can link to participant webpages. Send in those URL's.

They are working on an office LAN with a direct connection to LC-DC that doesn't rely on the Indian telephone system. They can search MUMS-OCLC etc.

The serials catalogers are being trained via OCLC in CONSER. They will need a NUC symbol for Field Office cataloging.

Turning to fiscal matters. As of January 1998, half the participants were in the red rupee-wise. There is no IODA report but a hybrid report might be possible.

Lygia made a trip to Nepal where she interviewed 12 candidates for the position of LC representative including 4 good ones. A new rep was selected but appointment is still in process.

A number of acquisition trips are underway or planned. Sending different staff members to different places to get different perspectives. They are looking for Christian liberation theology materials from the South. There are changes in dealerships. The Tibetan selector was sent to Nepal and acquired participant copies of Chinese imprints.

In response to questions about the upcoming bills, Lygia replied that the overhead percentage needs to be figured before they can prepare them. Remember this upcoming year will be full dollar day. Lygia plans to prepare a core program to appeal to other libraries.

In response to a question about the rejection rate, she noted that the rate for English is 30%. But it varies by language.

The Lok Sabha Secretariat has filmed the Lok Sabha debates. LC-Delhi will investigate acquiring French materials from Pondicherry that are not part of the French Institute. Expect trekking maps from Nepal, a language atlas from Sage. They need to do an update on the Survey of India maps.

LC-Delhi wants to improve serials claiming procedures and quickly let participants know current status of questionable titles.

3. By-laws revision discussion.

Should voting be limited to one from each institution. No, but it should be secret, via ballots enclosed in separate envelopes. (A response to e-mail voting).

Should the South Asia Council (SAC) faculty representative also vote. No decision?

Should there be voting and non-voting members. To be a member of CONSALD, one must be a member of AAS as CONSALD is a subgroup of AAS.

People can be encouraged to join CONSALD via the AAS newsletter and the listserv.

4. SALNAQ report from David Nelson

What is the purpose of SALNAQ, should it move to notes & queries and away from the feature articles. Could/would CONSALDers review new reference sources as they're published, report on projects at individual institutions, new accessions, review websites, videos, etc. If SALNAQ ceases, then prepaid subscriptions will need to be refunded.

Report from CRL by Marlys Rudeen.
CRL has the current LC participant profiles as of January 1998 on the CRL webpage.

Milton Wolf is the Vice President for Collections and Programs.

ICON the International Coalition on Newspapers will meet in DC on April 8 addressing preservation and access issues.

There will be a new version of the CRL website in April.

CRL wishes to cooperate with the AAS Publications committee on the Doctoral Dissertations on Asia project.

6. CONSALD taskforce on electronic products.

Jim Nye discussed the Crea Tamil dictionary and the Oxford Hindi dictionary. Members should identify other products of interest.

7. BAS on line project.

David Magier brought us up to date on this project. It is being demonstrated in the exhibit area. The CD-ROM product has been abandoned for the time being and it has moved to the web. Covers 1971-1997. There are 462,000 records with South Asia heavily represented because of the additional indexing some institutions paid for. They welcome enhancement suggestions. Could add e-journals and e- conferences, etc. with links to JSTOR and other full text sources. Bindu Bhatt did the indexing at Columbia, she is now the Area Studies Library Specialist at Colombia.

8. Title VI funding.

The status is fragile. ARL is lobbying. Title VI is being considered for consolidation with Title XI in the House committee and approved 36 to 3.

9. Berkeley Unicode project.

Suzanne McMahon discussed the Berkeley project to digitize Panjabi and Urdu language publications.

10. ARL Digital South Asia Library Project. Index periodical contents at URC in roman format now (but Unicode later) and provide scanned full text via e-mail.

The text of the project proposal is available on the Chicago website.

Lygia mentioned that ARL has invited the LC Field Directors to meet before ALA to discuss how to improve the collection of materials. Solicit suggestions on how to improve digital collection to serve the scholarly community. The LC field offices could contribute indexing of earlier journals and vernacular materials.

11. The British Library's official publications from India at the University of Chicago cannot be loaned via ILL. There are 22,500 volumes of official publications which is a duplicate of the India Office collection. A webpage is coming soon.

12. Booklab Reference tools update

The British Library's regional language catalogues from Booklab will be shipped shortly. Next for consideration are the India Office Library catalogues 1888-1918.

13. Reports from consortia and institutions.

SACEast. NY state preservation grant proposal, Columbia, New York Public Library and Cornell to preserve pre PL480 vernacular language monographs.

CIC . Lawyers are working on the contracts for the CREA and Oxford dictionaries on the web.

URC is inputting Urdu journal titles. MIPP will begin filming Urdu monographs shortly.

Report on Indiana conference on training the area librarians of the future. An MLA wasn't considered important. Internships at the field offices for training. Mentoring by seasoned staff.

Columbia is cataloging and digitizing the manuscripts in Pingree's index.

Duke has enhanced the incomplete records for 16,000 titles in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Sanskrit and Marathi.

Duke, Berkeley and Columbia have political pamphlets from the 60's-80's not all are in the political pamphlet set published by UPA. How to make them manageable one political party at a time.

Deon Dempsey, University of Texas, is working on a bibliography of Kerala.

CIC is working on a project that will search 13 library OPACs simultaneously.

The LC Field office serials list is old. Fresh data in January lacks country and language codes. It is hoped that a new list can merge Pakistan date into the file.

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