Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation
Minutes of the Meeting
March 11, 1999. Boston Marriott Copley Place

I. Preliminaries.
  1. Announcement: AIIS Reception at 5 pm today, Salon F 3/4th Floor.
  2. Minutes Approval. Of 26^th March 1998 in Washington, DC. - Approved.
  3. SAC meeting agreed to pay for coffee. Mary Drake, Backup, From Prichard.

II. Library of Congress Reports

  New Delhi - Lygia Ballantyne

Acquisitions. New Delhi office is staffed now; more travel is paying off. Sir Lanka declining receipts, but hired new dealer in Columbo. Mongolia - one good trip; another planned for June; lots of publications, even in English; 14 in that program presently. Assam and North-East new dealer. Nepal, after 2 years, now have some. Aligarh and Kashmir selector will see how much is there and how much we can get.
    Result of good efforts - more receipts. Before selection used to be 37% increases; now 25% increases, and have to be even more selective. Look at budget, combined obligations, which is annualized every month; allows to give participants pre-warnings; such as already sent out about shipping - the slight increase in the U.S., meant a 25% overall increase. Review of shipping showed we are using the cheapest lift vans. Also made a comparison with other book vendors and their prices - the full survey is available on request.
*Cataloging - not much to report; paying lots of attention to S.E. Asia. Covering Mongolia and Thailand pretty well.
*Serials. Did a lot this year, improved serials delivery. Local supervisors have emails and are responsible for their own areas; getting about 40 emails a day, spread among supervisors of departments; sending out serials updates by email. Exploring putting it up on the web with a search engine. Can supply individualized reports - tailored to your format (text, WordPerfect, FoxPro).
*Web Page - just sent 35 pages to be updated to Washington, for their review.
*Audits - past years limited ones done by LC; this year a full review took lots of time.
*Department of State tri-year Inspection to be regularized, such as paying language consultants; part of legislation on the Revolving Fund, and the Financial Statement.
*Staff - Alice Kniskern is retiring this year - welcome input for sendoff set for late May. Farewell messages. If anyone is in Delhi. come to celebration. Ballantyne moving to another house/location.
*LC celebrating 200 years next year, and Delhi also wants to celebrate; welcome ideas - such as recording important South Asia writers; Thrasher - a button; Nye a traveling exhibit around South Asia, maybe with rare books.
*Questions and comments - Nye - would be good if Pakistan could send to Serials Database at the same time India. Magier - cataloging mistakes, depending on category, who to send to; also send to Delhi for their information.

Pakistan -- Judy McDermott
*Ordered departure, but returned Jan. 20^th. Situation remains quiet.
*Gives detailed statistical report with total figures.
*Publication section flourishing, though Afghanistan publications have not recovered. Iranian doing well.
*Jan.-Feb. confrontation between two groups, lasting several weeks; eventually resolved and resumed publication.

Discussion of LC offices activities. Raised some binding questions, especially with Iran serials vendor; also missing issues, spine information not correct; should inform offices of binding problems. **CONSALD thought serials updates were helpful. **Will trips to Kashmir/Mongolia look at everything? Ballantyne - yes.

Update on MIPP. With change of government, money not available; doing a little from other sources (CRL, SAMP, and LC).
Program currently under review - 2 cameras working in Hyderabad on Urdu. McDermott - Looking at how it could be continued, as LC project? - don't know as yet.

III. Report on LC Cataloging Workshop­Alan Grosenheider
Held at Harvard this year: smaller, breakout sessions were longer; suggestions for next year include electronic cataloging.

List of SA catalogers in the US (Mary Rader).

IV. Bylaws Revisited
*Various provisions reviewed and discussed; to be reviewed again in Madison, and changed at next year's AAS meeting. Changes - from 3-year terms to 2-year terms, agreed. Change from 2 to 3 ex-officio members of 1) Newsletter editor, 2) LC representative, add 3) CRL representative; Approved.

Announcement by Nye - wish to commemorate landmarks, such as CONSALD's 30^th anniversary; will wait for Maureen Patterson.

BREAK

V. SALNAQ Online­ David Nelson and Philip McEldowney. David Nelson reporting.
*Considering the suggestion to migrate from a paper to an electronic Newsletter. Discusses and raises questions of design, content, take advantage of already existing publication, for publication about South Asia Resources, information on databases; central location for SAMP and CONSALD minutes. What should be represented in each publication? 6 or 7 topics rather than list of short items. Want it to be cooperative, send in contributions; always dynamic. Include News & Notes. Own web site, linked from other sites.
*Further discussion of SALNAQ scope and purpose - if clearing house, duplicates SARAI? Just Notes and Queries? A Listserv? Mainly reviews and evaluations? Used outside U.S?
*General opinion - would like something to continue.

Maureen Patterson - I founded SALNAQ. This is 30^th CONSALD anniversary; 25th anniversary of SALNAQ - at the beginning it was a review of important reference works, dictionaries; just what everyone wanted - both general and specific. Came out of the 1974 Boston Conference, not from Library of Congress.

Magier - a current awareness tool; Burlingham - if goes back to S.A. people - do they want it printed out and emailed? Nye - value by editing; stake out what you want and do it. McMahon - do a mission statement. Joshi - send in contributions by xx date. Mitchell - I do a bulletin with a theme each time - next is on images. McMahon - let us know.

VI. Acknowledgment and Appreciation of the services of Maureen Patterson. Speeches and applause.

VII. CRL Digital Library Projects­ Jim Nye and David Magier

Nye - announcement of a new grant, late June. Department of Education, Innovations program Title VI.606.

Phase II of the digital libraries (Mellon Funding)

Substantial expansion in
*Full text documents
*Statistical Data
*Photographic images
*Cartographic
*Geographic

Expanded to include British Library, Oxford University, Cambridge University, and archives in South Asia, including Nepal and Pakistan.

Groupings of Full Text resources, Pictorial images, Bibliographic resources.
Examples of full text - Asia Society Briefings, Economic and Political Weekly; Official Publications of South Asia, beyond 1947. Examples of Images - 250,000 images created under the British Library. Other examples - 200 maps in GIS format; historical collection of maps. Statistical Abstracts of British India. Bibliographic resources - Urdu, Tamil, and English; expanding number of journals, languages, and depth. Regional languages in the BAS a) display information in format (unicode) b) track web usage using JSTOR analyses. About $180,000 for 3 years; 1/3rd already matched.
Magier - bring up in electronic format, important Urdu works and translations - side by side as pedagogical tool - assisted by Fran Prichett who has selected 12 works - and linked to dictionary. Discussion of Grammars and Readers; why just 20 years old? why those languages? For strategic reasons. Dictionaries - Tamil, Platt's Urdu - hope for one dictionary for each language.

VIII. Round Robin

Mel Thatcher - Genealogical Society of Utah. Micofilmed genealogical records from various sites and types - Goa church records, Maithili pedigries; Gaya and Nasak pilgramage records; Madras church records; Bombay; Kerala. Want you to use the materials we have filmed through the Family History Center System.

Krishan Khera - University of Toronto.
Development of Index to personal names from Harappa to 1947; Indian personal names in Indian history, just one line with name and reference; from 11 volumes of the History and Culture of the Indian People.

Bhasker. NY Public Library.
Microfilming of pre-1950 South Asia imprints. Funded by a NY State grant, NYPL along with Columbia University participated in a microfilming project to film pre-1950 South Asian imprints. NYPL submitted 215 volumes (162 titles). Subjects covered in the Humanities were literature in Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati; plus several English language titles in Religion, Philosophy, Yoga etc. The staff of 3 had to do original cataloging for the majority of titles before submitting for microfilming.

Popuri. Queens Borough Public Library
CNN and foreign collections. 1 million people visited in 7 months. Beautiful building.

Mitchell. University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Scout report - working with Asia, Don Johnson, and S.A. graduate student.

Burlingham - Texas. Martha Selby joining faculty and teaching Tamil.

Joshi - Washington-Seattle.
*Newspaper list demo.
*What's in India - Listing of newspaper archives in Bhopal - 50 new titles
*Now just under 3000 titles, from 337 reporting institutions. Uchicago will house the web site.

Alan Grosenheider - Washington-Seattle
*Serving on ALA - Exec as S.A. specialist

Popuri - Queens. We are linking with Shanhai library

CRL James Simon
Kaisar-i-Hind collated and estimated cost. Very brittle, 1880-1889. And other titles.

Thrasher - LC.
*Acquisitions budget holding up. No new cuts in profile.
*National Digital Library with Asian/Asian-American interest. American Mission Presses.
*Shelving together South and South East language materials.
*Asian has been told we can move our South and Southeast Asian rare books to the Jefferson Bdlg. before the rest of the collections are moved
*Cataloging staff - several retired this year; activities with classical Mongolian; duplicates; transliteration with Shan and Karin.
*Please tell me about any projects you may have had to upgrade LC PREMARC or other online records.

Nye - Chicago.
*Urdu Research library is now Y2K compliant. Filming has begun by MIPP. Staff are expected to begin filming serials; camera to be shipped off. Help with maintenance of camera in Hyderabad. Fruitful conversations with Ford Foundation for funding.

Magier. Columbia.
*Hired S. A. library specialist, very good. Recon Projects - improving Hindu classification system.
*Another off-site storage, nothing will go there without full cataloging.
*Digital South Asia - a new Center - CAOR Center.

Susan Go. U of Michigan.
*Has posted a position announcement for a S.A. librarian, closing at the end of the month; 9 applications so far, more wanted.
*Finished with Tibetan materials.
*Will hire a S.A. Economist; have hired a S.A. modern historian.

Weidner Library - 2 items from India

McMahon. Berkeley.
*Global Immigration Project - didn't get funded.
*?? To California Digital Library
*Still updating websites on Nuclear Testing and Diaspora

Close at 4:38 pm [Recorder - Philip McEldowney]

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