India 1995-1996

Summary: This was my first trip to India as South Asia librarian for Berkeley.  My goal was to meet publishers, booksellers, Library of Congress Field Office staff, key people in Indian information technology, and to visit library collections of significant interest to Berkeley researchers.  By attending the World Book Fair I was able to meet a wide range of  book vendors and publishers in all our key languages of colleciton (English, Hindi, Urdu, Panjabi, Tamil, and Sanskrit).  Attending the Library of Congress Field Office mini-conference made it possible for me to meet the acquisitions staff from all the South Asian countries and to quickly become familiar with the Library of Congress operation.  Based on information I gathered during the stay in New Delhi I decided that continued participation in the Library of Congress program was the most efficient method of acquiring print monographs from South Asian. In 1995 Irene Joshi from University of Washington had done a similar evaluation for serials.  As we drew up the agreement for the South Asia Consortium West (SACWest), including  Univ. of Washington, Univ. of Texas, Univ. of Hawaii, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, we were able to make the Library of Congress collection profile for South Asia the basis of our cooperative collecting decisions.   The union profile format that SACWest put together to document cooperative collection decisions became the model for South Asia Consortia and was adopted by CRL.  After spending time in New Delhi  I also made trips to Tamil Nadu and the Punjab to begin a more in depth evaluation of collecting possibilities in those areas.  I also visited Bangalore, the center of the computer industry in India. Based on my interviews with members of the Information Technology and publishing industries in India I wrote a paper on the state of  ITin India.  I presented that paper at the WEBNET '96 conference and it was subsequently published in the conference proceedings.

NEW DELHI

World Book Fair New Delhi
I attended the World Book Fair a biennial exhibition of the Indian publishing industry at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi.  Around a thousand English language, regional language, and specialty book publisher and distributors exhibit.   This was an excellent way for me to become quickly oriented to the Indian book trade.  Besides print publishers the fair included a few representatives working in electronic publishing, notably Infomatics, who continues to publish useful CD-ROMs. I also attended an Internet workshop sponsored by the Indian Librarian's association, including a lecture by Dr. Seshagiri, director of National Informatics Center.  Rather than purchasing books at the fair I referred titles I wanted to the acquisitions department in the Library of Congress Field Office because they are able to procure discounts and could ship the titles back with the regular LC shipments to U.S. libraries. (Pictured at right: S McMahon at Pragati Maidan.)

Library of Congress Field Directors Conference
While I was in Delhi the Library of Congress Field Office I attended the LC Field Directors Conference held at the American Center, including James Armstrong, Islamabad, Will Trujillo, Jakarta , and Lygia Ballantyne New Delhi. Helen Poe attended for LC Washington.  We had detailed reports on the activities of each field office along with reports from acquisitions staff from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Burma.   This was an important introduction for me to the LC acquisitions program. I toured the LC facility and evaluated titles along with the acquisitions staff to help clarify what titles would be useful on U.S. university libraries. 

Other Meetings
While in Delhi I also met with Dr. A. Lahiri, head of NISSAT,  an agency that funds digital library project and I had a tour of the CSIR facility at Jawaharlal Nehru University .  I also met  Dr. N. Seshagiri, head of the National Informatics Center, and with his web team working at NIC.   I met with Dr. T. Vishwanathan, director of INSDOC, and with Tejeshwar Singh, managing editor of Sage Publishing in New Delhi. (Pictured at right, the NIC webteam with S. McMahon.)

Chandigarh

Punjab University Library, Chandigarh
Chandigarh was my base of operations for visits in Punjab.  My host, Prof. Sardul Singh of Punjab University arranged for me to meet the Chief Librarian at the University Library.  I toured  the print collection, concentrating on what serials they subscribed to in Panjabi.  I had a demonstration of the newly installed digital unit on the library where an online catalog was being built through retrospective conversion.

Guru Nanak Dev University Library, Amritsar
I took a one day trip to Amritsar to visit the library at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar.  Prof. Atamjit Singh provided introductions to the librarians.  I was able to spend the morning in the manuscripts section and examined a number of gurumukhi and devanagri manuscripts.  I was able to visit several I was able to visit booksellers during the afternoon.  (Pictured at right a popular bookstall offering books and journals.)

Panjabi University, Patiala
I attended the  Conference on Punjabi Language held at the Panjabi University in Patiala. While in Patiala I was also able to tour the University library and the recently opened Panjabi research facility.

Madras

Cre-A Books/Dilip Kumar

I visited Cre-A books, the supplier for Library of Congress in Madras.   I met with R.K Ramakrishnan and Dilip Kumar to discuss the Tamil publishing and distribution markets.  I also visited the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) library.

Bangalore

Bangalore is the center of the Information Technology industry in India. Kirloskar Multimedia is developing CD-ROMs for the western market and I was able to evaluate two products, one a CD-ROM on Rabindranath Tagore and the other a general introduction to the regions of India for undergraduates. Kirloskar has since emerged as an important publisher of high quality electronic media in India. I visited the library at the Indian Institute of Science and met with library director N.M. Malwad, who had sponsored a conference on digital libraries the preceding month (proceedings published as Digital libraries: dynamic storehouse of digitized information).

*Itinerary

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