South Asian Travel


	South Asia
	As part of my responsibilities as selector for South Asia I have undertaken three trips to the Indian subcontinent. The goals and impacts of these trips are described in detail on these travel pages. For selectors acquiring materials from areas outside the United States it is extremely important to make periodic trips to the region for which they are responsible. These trips make it possible to: 1) establish and maintain important relationships with vendors, publishers, librarians, and academics working in the regions; 2) to develop familiarity with important research collections that will be useful to Berkeley researchers; 3) to pursue alternate access methods for materials such as document delivery and electronic publishing; 4) to provide access to unique materials through acquisition or duplication (microfilm or scanning); 5) to remain aware of academic trends of the region (in an era when the post-colonial perspective has become important in virtually every field of study it is not sufficient to understand only what is happening in the Western academy). The selector has the responsibility to provide for the immediate needs of the Berkeley instructional programs, but must also develop broad knowledge and adequate networks to build a collections that will serve future research. In my case, travel to the South Asia region has helped me greatly in fulfilling both these collecting goals. I am maintaining these travelogues as part of my biography pages to provide a record of my trips and offer some insight into the purpose of my travel and of its benefits to the Berkeley and wider U.S. library community.

	Copyright (C) 1998 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved. Document maintained on server: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ by: smcmahon@library.berkeley.edu Last update1/9/99. Server manager: webman@library.berkeley.edu