NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 21 number 2 - Winter 2001

By Chris Filstrup, formerly with Collection Management, Organization, and Preservation

The NCSU Libraries, as part of its global perspective on collection development, is supporting a new National Resource Center for South Asia. With U.S. Department of Education funding, the library is purchasing books, journals, and videos in Urdu, Hindi, and English that were published in India and Pakistan.

The study of South Asia has a long history among Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) campuses. Duke University has collected South Asian materials since the early 1960s. A number of faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State have strong research interests in South Asia. Under the leadership of NC State Professor of Religion Tony Stewart, scholars of South Asia on the four TRLN campuses pooled intellectual resources to form the Triangle South Asia Council (TriSAC). This multi-campus body proposed a shared South Asia center to the Department of Education. The result is federal funding of $1 million to support a center for three years. The benefits to NC State are courses on South Asia, especially on Hindi and Urdu; vigorous outreach activities that bring the richness of South Asian culture and history to the citizens of North Carolina; and significantly increased library collections that support teaching and research.

The center is a pioneer in the area of library materials and staff, because the four campuses will share a single South Asia bibliographer and will build a single, coordinated collection. The Department of Education found this level of cooperation especially attractive in deciding to fund the center, because it spreads collection benefits to four campuses rather than just one.

The shared bibliographer will work with collection development librarians, faculty, and students on all four campuses to build a unified South Asia collection that has a minimum of duplication. This coordination is especially important for South Asian languages other than English. These are usually called vernacular languages, and they are written in several non-Roman scripts. They require linguistic expertise to identify, acquire, and process. The beauty of the shared bibliographer position is twofold. First, each individual library does not have to hire a specialist. One specialist works for all the libraries. Second, a single bibliographer will be able to coordinate collection building and avoid duplication. Only materials needed for instruction will be purchased in multiple copies. Working with TriSAC, the three largest TRLN libraries agreed to share responsibility for Hindi and to split responsibility for the following languages: NC State, Urdu; UNC-Chapel Hill, Tamil; Duke, Bengali and Persian. Having the collection in separate locations should not pose problems for users because NC State's TRIPSaver service is being extended to all TRLN libraries. Through this quick delivery service, patrons on any campus can request materials from another TRLN library and receive the materials within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

A great research library is not only large; it is diverse. The development of the South Asian center will bring a good sample of South Asian publishing to the stacks.