Minutes
of the Meeting Fall 2002
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
Thursday, 10 October 2002, 2-6 P.M.
362 Conference Room Memorial Library
Submitted by Mary Rader
Approved 27 March 2003
[but, if you know of any revisions and corrections,
send to Mary Rader, mrader at umich.edu,
with a copy to
Philip McEldowney]
I. Attendees and preliminaries
II. Round Robin
III. Review and approval of the minutes
IV. Treasurer's Report
V. SAMP update
VI. DSAL/DDSA update
VII. CRL update
VIII. Brainstorm re: Endangered South Asia Libraries
IX. Mapping strengths of our collections
Brief Announcements
X. LC-Delhi report
XI. LC-Islamabad report
I. Attendees and preliminaries
Attending the meeting were:
James Armstrong (LC-Islamabad),
Larry Ashmun (Wisconsin),
Brent Bianchi (TRLN/Duke),
Bronwen Bledsoe (Chicago),
Tim Bryson (Emory),
Merry Burlingham (Texas),
James Gentner (LC-OVOP),
Monica Ghosh (Hawaii),
Alan Grosenheider (Washington),
Don Johnson (Minnesota),
Patricia Kuntz (Wisconsin),
Ved Kayastha (Cornell),
Catherine Lee (UCLA),
Surya Mittal (DK Agencies),
Panna Naik (Pennsylvania),
Mary Rader (Michigan),
Todd Scudieri (Wisconsin),
James Simon (CRL), and
Andrea Singer (Indiana)
Robin Rider, the head of Collection Development at U Wisconsin, welcomed the group.
II. Round Robin
- Larry Ashmun: Larry introduced their new student
assistant, Todd Scudieri. UW is searching for a new project
manager for the PAIR (formerly DAL) project. Wisconsin has a new
Center Director, Vinay Dvarkar and they are working to coordinate
the new Summer Language Institute.
- Andrea Singer: Jerry Larson is retiring and so they
have begun their search for a new head of their India Studies
program. Over the weekend, IU is hosting the CIC program on new
technologies for research and teaching in International Studies.
Andrea also mentioned that they are now allowed to tap general
collection funds for the India Studies collection.
- Don Johnson: Minnesota is beginning a search for an
Urdu professor. DAL officially ended on Sept. 30th but as of Oct.
1st, its new incarnation, the Portal for Asian Internet Resources
(PAIR) began. Through PAIR, they will explore issues related to
the funding of web archiving and associated copyright issues.
UMinn Libraries have a large project to scan maps, photographs and
so on from their rare book collection-in total they hope to
digitize approximately 2000 titles. Of those will be photos from
1900-1930 documenting the "Infrastructure of the Raj." Don
anxiously awaits next year's publication of Wedding attire on
five continents, to which he is both contributor and
editor.
- Merry Burlingham: Three new faculty members have joined
Texas: R. Kumar (Hindi), S. Hassan (Urdu) and O. Freiberger (Buddhism).
They are in the process of recruiting a new South Asia anthropologist.
The map librarian at UT is digitizing approximately 270 sheets of US
Army maps from the 1950s, some of which will be from India and Pakistan;
these will most likely be available in 2003 (through the Perry Castaneda
Library's map collection). Harold Billings, their library director,
will be retiring next year. UT is participating in the Knowledge
Gateway, a digital system interlinking documents such as historical
children's literature, travel literature, guidebooks and the
like.
- Ved Kayastha: Cornell's South Asia section experienced
a 0% budget increase this year and will probably see this trend
continue for the next 3-5 years. All funds, it seems, are being
channeled to digital and electronic resources.
- Panna Naik: David Nelson is currently on a trip and it
is expected that he will acquire important Jain manuscripts from
the L.D. Institute. Penn's budget is good and they are buying lots
of videos and DVDs which they are happy to see heavily used.
Panna's second book of short stories will come out in a month; she
was also awarded the Gujarat Literary Academy of America award for
her work.
- Catherine Lee: UCLA has received a Freeman Foundation
grant to develop the East and Southeast Asia library collections.
They purchased the new critical edition of the Tanjur (circularized
through LC). Their Center for Buddhist Studies continues to grow
with the addition of Boswell (China), Bottiford (Japan) and Schopen
(SAsia and Tibet). Last month, the Southern California South Asia
group hosted a conference on Mirabai. UCLA is searching for a new
University Librarian and a new Southeast Asia librarian. They did
not experience budget cuts so far this year but they are facing
serials cancellations.
- Todd Scudieri: Todd is in his second semester of his
MLS at U Wisconsin. He received his MA in South Asian studies at U
Wisconsin as well.
- Brent Bianchi: As Avinash Maheshwary's duties have
expanded to cover the Research Triangle's library network, they
have added a second person to help with collection development.
Brent enjoys working with Avinash at Duke and welcomes comments or
suggestions on issues related to cooperative collection
development.
- Surya Mittal: DK Agencies is an associate of the Asia
Studies Virtual Website. In addition, DK hopes to contribute
records to OCLC in the near future.
- Patti Kuntz: Patti is the African Studies librarian at
the U of Wisconsin.
- Monica Ghosh: Hawaii has a couple of new hires: M.
DasGupta in Ethnic Studies (SA diaspora) and L. Parrot in
philosophy. They have experienced no change in their budget but
they are experiencing different distributions of it. Hawaii
significantly revised their LC profile last year. Hawaii is
hosting two Rockefeller scholars: one who works on women in
construction and one how works on border issues. G. Spivak is
coming to their English department next semester. They are having
a spring symposium on film and social justice. Monica has also
assumed duties as the faculty director for Hawaii's Center for
South Asian Studies.
- Bronwen Bledsoe: Bronwen assures us that the large-
scale projects headed up by Chicago are moving forward. In the
next year, Chicago hopes to recruit faculty to teach Marathi,
Kannada and Telugu.
- Mary Rader: Michigan will have a search this year for
2 new positions: South Asian Islam and South Asian Media Studies.
The Library has begun a project to index architecture-related
journals for the BAS. The Scholarly Publishing Office of the
Library is beginning an effort to digitize the Area Centers' out of
print publications.
- James Simon: postponed his comments until later in the
meeting.
- Alan Grosenheider: U Washington has made the
significant acquisition of a Gandharan manuscript. The Library has
been pleased to see an increase of gifts related to this
acquisition. Anand Yang has been appointed the new director of the
Jackson School. Last year, their budget was cut approximately 10%.
Although it is still unclear as they haven't yet been given their
budget allocations, they hope that this year's budget will not be
cut as much. On a personal note, Alan became a father this
year.
- James Gentner: At the time of the meeting, LC had
still not received its budget from Congress; they are hoping to
have it by Monday (Oct 14). There have been some personnel changes
at LC: Karl Lowe's contract has ended and Robert Warden of the
Federal Research Division is the acting chief of the Asia Division.
Lygia Ballantyne's last day will be next Friday (Oct 18); after
her departure from Delhi, Lygia will be a Field Director in
Residence in Washington. Carol Mitchell will be the acting Field
Director until January when Laila Mulgaokar takes Lygia's place.
The Cairo position will be posted; in the meantime James will be
the acting director. Will Tuchrello will be taking a leave of
absence next year; Jim Armstrong will be moving to Jakarta to fill
his position. Laila will attend the AAS next spring, as will Lygia
most likely. The anthrax scare lingers at LC; USPS continues to
direct mail for irradiation and the Library is just now receiving
mail sent in August. Although books are also being irradiated,
participants' materials are not as the materials in the lift vans
come directly to the Library from Delhi.
- James Armstrong: Jim reserved his comments for later
in the meeting.
- Tim Bryson: Currently in his 4th year at Emory, Tim
reports that their budget continues to be strong. Emory lost their
Sanskrit professor this year but have hired 2 new people, Nadine Berardi
and Diana Dimitrova, a 2nd Hindi professor. The Asian Studies chair
reports that they will be looking for a Telugu instructor and perhaps a
Tibetan instructor soon. They are trying to increase their development
efforts in the local community and the Library has a new initiative to
"market" the library to potential user groups. On a personal note, Tim
got married 2 weeks after the last AAS.
III. Review and approval of the
minutes
A few typos and corrections were noted after which the minutes from
the March meeting were passed.
IV. Treasurer's Report (Rader)
The current balance in the CONSALD account is $913.23. The
question was raised if the South Asia Council might give money to
CONSALD. A report on this will be given at the next meeting.
V. SAMP update (Rader)
SAMP will have elections for 2 executive committee members (1
librarian, 1 faculty member) at the AAS meeting in New York. The
nominating committee for this election consists of Monica Ghosh,
Ray Lum and Andrea Singer. The AISLS-SAMP collaborations discussed
in March are on hold due to Sri Lanka National Archives priorities
and projects. Hopefully smaller AISLS identified projects can move
forth in the meantime. The approved proposal for filming of the
Indian Review has been tabled as it was discovered
that IDC has already filmed this title. A representative of the
National College of Arts (formerly the Mayo School of Arts) in
Lahore contacted us as they are interested collaborating with SAMP
on projects to preserve their archives (which include their
institutional archives as well as folios, books, maps, building
plans, drawings and photographs from 1880-1950, etc.). James Simon
added that SAMP might like to consider making a suggestion to the
next round of CRL purchase proposals. He also noted that
Shab Khun is now ready for use.
VI. DSAL/DDSA update (Simon)
James Simon reported on the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL),
Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) and the new South Asia
Information Access (SAIA) projects.
As of July, Rebecca Moore stepped down from DSAL and Gerald Hall
has been the acting project manager since. (Rebecca can be
contacted at rebeccaisretired at yahoo.com) CRL was granted
a one-year extension for the DSAL project. In July, the DSAL
server experienced a crash but no data was lost; a new firewall and
standby server have been put in place. Unfortunately, this crash
has postponed the uploading of some material but that will begin
again soon. DSAL now has over 40 distinct resources (within 7
categories) in its collection which includes almost 200,000
records. They plan to soon add the final volumes of the
Imperial Gazetteer of India; a database of prints,
drawings and photography from the Oriental and India Office
Collection; and the final issues of Mahfil. At the
present time, there are 5 dictionaries (in 4 languages) available
through DDSA: Pali, Urdu, Persian and Anglo-Indian. 15 other
dictionaries will be uploaded by the time of the AAS. Devanagari
is now displaying properly and they hope to have other South Asian
scripts available soon. Both DSAL and DDSA have observed a steady
increase in the number of users. On average, they count
approximately 8,000 unique domains each month.
On October 1, funding for the new phase of the DSAL project,
South Asia Information Access, became available. This second phase
will allow the development of a collaborative project by a
federation of institutions to deliver additional digital research
materials concerning South Asia to users in the U.S. and throughout
the world by means of the already established DSAL site. James
Simon will be the co-project manager of this project. Monica Ghosh
asked if SAIA might want to consider collaborating with the Central
Institute of Indian Languages. Brent Bianchi asked for more
clarification about the geographic scope of the project.
VII. CRL update (Simon)
A recent Mellon grant has enabled CRL to begin cataloging what were
formerly uncataloged foreign dissertations. Although this is not
full-level cataloging, so far CRL has been able to produce
approximately 1,000 records a week, or 70,000 dissertations in the
first 8 months of the project. (Don Johnson suggested that CRL
consider adding Canadian dissertations to the foreign dissertation
collection.) CRL has engaged in a strategic plan review which has
led to a highlighting of CRL strengths such as the Area Studies
Council (ASC) projects. They are looking at possibilities for
creating collaborative software (like e-room software). Another
Mellon grant has funded a collaborative project (partners include
CRL, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, TX and LC) to archive internet
resources. The hope is that this project will help address some of
the problems of this kind of work, particularly how to identify and
curate/update these records; they will provide post-study
recommendations when they're complete (in 2004). CRL is hosting a
Cooperative Collection Development Conference in November in
Aberdeen Woods.
VIII. Brainstorm re: Endangered South Asia
Libraries (Singer)
On behalf of Rebecca Manring, Andrea solicited suggestions for
funding sources for South Asian Libraries in danger of destruction,
etc. They already have explored IFLA and UNESCO's "Memory of the
World" projects. If anyone has any suggestions, please contact
Rebecca at rmanring at indiana.edu.
Much discussion ensued, particularly addressing issues of the
need for further clarification of potential projects; whether
grants to doctoral students through CLIR might be applicable; if
Fullbright's "Senior Specialists" program might apply to these
kinds of projects; how the Africa Research Central website lists
research centers and their needs; how there is a need for
collective pooling of knowledge and a need to reach out.
IX. Mapping strengths of our collections
(Ghosh)
Monica lead a discussion on how to present ourselves collectively
(and, perhaps individually). The main question driving the
discussion was that of collection development policies-who has
them, what are they, where are our strengths and weaknesses?
Monica sees a lack of library literature about South Asian
collection development and believes this kind of study would be of
great use. Some discussion ensued: Merry suggested consulting the
North American Title Count; Don Johnson suggested that an analysis
re: what resources physical libraries continue to provide vs. what
web resources do would be helpful; Ved suggested that a comparison
of what LC provides vs. what outside vendors might would be of
interest; James Simon mentioned that such a study would be of
interest to CRL, particularly as it might identify where gaps are
in national collections, etc. The final result was that Monica is
going to devise and send out a survey that will be reported on by
the time of the AAS.
Brief Announcements:
Merry alerted us to the Adam Matthew product "Empire on line,"
which contains British Library and Oriental and India Office
Collection materials, particularly aimed at the undergraduate
level. Also of potential interest would be Adam Matthew's "India
through western eyes."
It was reported that David Magier would like to invite the
Bibliography of Asian Studies indexer to attend the AAS meeting in
the spring, to address concerns about what is being indexed, who is
doing the indexing, etc.
Tim Bryson reported that Rich Richie (Yale) is curious if we can
organize a joint meeting of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East
Asia librarians at the next AAS to discuss common concerns (as part
of the ALL committee).
X. LC-Delhi Report (Gentner)
James Gentner gave Lygia's report.
The LC-Delhi office is celebrating its 40th anniversary. As part
of this, on Sept. 27th they officially released the South Asian
Literary Recordings project website. For more on this event, see:
http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/delhi/salrp/.
Carol Mitchell will be the interim head until Laila Mulgaokar takes
over in January. Laila has already visited the office and had a
two-week overlap with Lygia. The Delhi office has increased its
updates to the website, most notably in the areas of serials,
ephemera, newspapers and the fiche collection. The office has been
collecting and microfilming reactions to the events of Sept. 11th.
They have also been busy collecting materials regarding the recent
violence in Gujarat, such as white papers, government and NGO materials
and videos. 489 titles were circularized to participants this past
year. If participants are interested in more circulars, we should bring
that to Laila's attention; they have been doing this quite extensively
in the Cairo office. SCIMS is now fully operational; they have cut
their check-in time from 3 days to 1-1/2 days, automated lists are
easily generated and it is possible to generate a list of serials by
levels of selectivity. There as been a 12% decrease in newspaper
subscriptions and other formats are down 32% from the previous years.
That said, there is a 3% increase in monograph and 5% increase in
serials acquisition. After a trip to Dhaka, LC has a new dealer
(University Press Ltd) and the acquisitions from Bangladesh are up 40%.
Catalogers at the Delhi office were trained in H Schedule cataloging
last winter; full descriptive and subject cataloging from Delhi should
be up 75% in the upcoming months. Again, all belle lettres cataloging
will be done at the minimal level-they will include the LC call number
but will not be shelf-listed. Microfilm production in Delhi has
decreased from 2086 reels to 1071 reels while fiche production has
increased 43%. They have added more bibliographic detail to the film
leaders. 10 lift vans were shipped to LC this year. Sage Publications
is going to discontinue publishing the South Asia
Bibliographer.
XI. LC-Islamabad (Armstrong)
After Sept. 11th, Jim was evacuated from Pakistan. He returned in
December and was evacuated again in March. Although he technically
would have returned at the end of September, his position at LC-
Islamabad ended on Sept. 30th (Jim is headed for the Jakarta office).
Jim urges Judy McDermott to post and fill the Islamabad position, even
if it may need to be staffed differently given the current
circumstances.
The Islamabad office has seen an increase in publications from
Afghanistan but overall the level of acquisitions has been stable
over the year (compared to last year). Jim reports a relatively
free press in Pakistan although the LC office is cautious not to go
against the local government's laws (for example, the circular over
the last year about illegal types of publication). The office has
seen some administrative improvements, notably the new website at
http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/islamabad, a new
click-stamp postal arrangement and a new office scanner (they will
entertain requests for scanned documents). They are starting to
get bibliographic control over approximately 870 titles as part of
the Afghan microfiche project. These cover broad subject areas
(back into the Soviet period) and should be available through LC
photodup. There have been a number of senior staff retirements
over the past year. Oxford UP publications should be coming
faster; participants can select all or no OUP publications,
etc.
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Last update:
Webbing - Philip
McEldowney, University of Virginia
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