Report of the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia to the Association of Research Libraries, Foreign Acquisitions Task Force

Final draft: not to be cited without authors' permission.

Written by Judith Henchy, University of Washington

Carol Mitchell, University of Wisconsin

With the assistance of Kent Mulliner, Ohio University

January 1994

Revised May 1994

Table of Contents

I. Introduction.......................................................................................... 1

II. CORMOSEA...................................................................................... 1

III. Southeast Asia as a field of scholarship.................................................. 5

IV. Information industries in Southeast Asia................................................. 7

IV.a. Media...................................................................................... 14

IV.b. Electronic information............................................................... 15

V. International distribution of scholarly publishing....................................... 16

VI. Language diversity............................................................................... 17

VII. Southeast Asia collections in the United States....................................... 18

VII. a. Acquisitions statistics................................................................ 22

VII. b. Acquisitions funding.................................................................. 27

VII. c. Collection development policies and issues................................. 29

VII. d. Defining Southeast Asia collecting responsibility......................... 30

VII. e. Cataloging................................................................................ 32

VII. f. Reporting and evaluation........................................................... 33

VIII. Bibliographic control............................................................................. 34

IX. Preservation......................................................................................... 36

X. Recommendations................................................................................ 39

XI. Bibliography......................................................................................... 43

Tables

1. Special strengths of CORMOSEA libraries............................................ 2

2. Staffing patterns at CORMOSEA libraries............................................. 3

3. Geographic distribution of Primary Collecting

Responsibility for Indonesia....................................................... 4

4. Illiteracy rates in Southeast Asia............................................................ 8

5. Publishing statistics by country.............................................................. 11

6. Publishing statistics by UDC classification.............................................. 12

7. Daily newspaper production and circulation............................................ 12

8. Media production and distribution........................................................... 15

9. Major language groups and scripts......................................................... 18

10 Collection curators for CORMOSEA collections.................................... 19

11. Library of Congress Field Office for SEA acquisitions statistics............... 20

12. Library of Congress distribution of monographs by country...................... 21

13. John M. Echols Collection, estimate of collection size.............................. 23

14. Survey of Southeast Asian library holdings, August 1993......................... 24

15. Comparative table of CORMOSEA collection sizes................................ 25

16. CORMOSEA library acquisitions for 1991/92......................................... 26

17. Comparative table of acquisitions 1, 1990-93.......................................... 26

18. Comparative table of acquisitions 2, 1986-93.......................................... 27

19. Luce Foundation funded preservation projects........................................ 38

Appendices

1. CORMOSEA faculty Representatives

2. The Southeast Asia Microforms Project

I. Introduction

This report has been written on behalf of the ten libraries represented on the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA), a subcommittee of the Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies. These libraries are located at the ten institution in the U.S. which have Southeast Asian Studies Centers: Arizona State University, Yale University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Northern Illinois University, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Ohio University, University of Washington, representing the Northwest Regional Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies, and the University or Wisconsin at Madison. Of these ten, only four are federally funded for a full range of graduate and undergraduate programs as National Resource Centers; one other is funded for undergraduate study, and another receives partial funding for FLAS scholarships only. It should be noted that not all of these institutions are ARL members.

The membership of this group is somewhat artificial, since other libraries are the sites of important collections on Southeast Asia. Indeed some of these libraries are active participants in the CORMOSEA meetings, but are not considered full voting members; in particular, Harvard University, and Columbia University have substantial Southeast Asia holdings, and their representatives are active participants in CORMOSEA activities. What all these libraries have in common, regardless of their status within the CORMOSEA group, is a commitment to the cooperative objectives that CORMOSEA embodies; almost all of the libraries which have current acquisitions arrangements from Southeast Asia send representatives to the Association for Asian Studies meeting to discuss improvements in cooperative access to materials. It is a measure of the difficulties of acquisition from the region that cooperation has always been regarded as the only feasible way of approaching both local and national access. This report hopes to highlight some of those difficulties, and the approaches that have been adopted by librarians to overcome them.

II. CORMOSEA

An important step in the development of Southeast Asian special collections was the formation of the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA) in 1969. While library representation was limited to those serving collections with established Centers, faculty representation aimed to include a broad range of disciplines, country interests, and institutions. A list of recent faculty participation is attached as Appendix 1. CORMOSEA has played a pivotal role since its inception in shaping the expectations of library collections; it has been active in promoting bibliographic projects, such as the Southeast Asian Research Tools Project which led to the publication of a series of bibliographical surveys of all the countries of the region by the University of Hawaii, Southeast Asian Studies Program. It has maintained ties with library and archival institutions in the region, such as SARBICA, the Southeast Asian Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives, in cooperation with which it established the Southeast Asia Microforms Project (SEAM). It has fostered relationships with the national Library Associations of the countries of the region, and has had a active presence at the triennial meetings of the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL).

The group has been an important focus of discussion for issues of funding, acquisitions and technical processing; it has been active in providing suggestions to the Library of Congress concerning the shortcoming of the overseas operations procedures, and in lobbying Library of Congress Cataloging bureaucracy for changes in authority records and issues of transliteration. Most recently it has been successful in negotiating with the Henry Luce Foundation for the distribution of funding for a cooperative preservation initiative. The group has also started to play a more active role working with other funding bureaucracies, such as the Department of Education, to ensure fair levels of funding for Southeast Asian collections at U.S. institutions.

Examples of cooperation among the CORMOSEA libraries include the division of the Philippines by province between Yale and Michigan for coverage of local documentation, and geographical distribution of sub-province level official publications from Indonesia described below. More recently the CORMOSEA libraries have responded to the crisis in serial costs by designating libraries of last resort for countries, or regions within countries. It is assumed that all CORMOSEA libraries maintain research-level collections of English and European-language serials and monographs. The group is concerned with establishing country strengths which are the basis of cooperative national collecting policy; collection strengths are defined by the levels of acquisitions for vernacular language materials and primary source materials.

TABLE I. SPECIAL STRENGTHS OF CORMOSEA LIBRARIES

Institution	Country Strength	Special collection
ASU	Undergraduate
California	Indonesia	Malay Hikayats
Cornell	Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia	Indochina collections, Balinese mss, Netherlands Indies etc.
Hawaii	Indonesia, Philippines
Michigan	Philippines, Thailand	Colonial Philippines, law
NIU	Burma	Paribak

TABLE I. SPECIAL STRENGTHS OF CORMOSEA LIBRARIES

Ohio	Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia	Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia
Washington^[1]	Vietnam, Northeast Thailand	Indonesian law
Wisconsin	Indonesia, Philippines	Modern Culture Projects
Yale	Indonesia, Cambodia

The staffing patterns below can also be used as an indication of language and country emphasis.

TABLE 2. STAFFING PATTERNS AT CORMOSEA LIBRARIES^[2]

Institution	Bibliog.	Lang.	Office	Cataloging	Student
ASU	1	Thai	0	1	1
California	0.5	Vietnamese	0	1 Tagalog
Cornell	2	Burm/Viet/Th	1.75	Burm/Viet/IndThai/Lao/Khm	25
Hawaii	1	Indon/Jpn/Tag	1		1
Michigan	1	Tagalog/ Visayan	0	1 Thai 1 Vietnamese	4
NIU	1	Burmese	1	1 Thai
Ohio	2.2	Indonesian	2	4 Mal/ Ind/Ch	13
Washington	1	Vietnamese	0	1.25 Ind/Viet	2
Wisconsin	1	Indonesian	0	1 Indonesian	3
Yale	1	Indonesian	1	1 Indonesian	1

As part of its commitment to developing a distributed cooperative plan for country specialization, CORMOSEA has endeavored to ensure that local government and cultural publications are acquired. Thus far, CORMOSEA has divided collection responsibility for Indonesia, assigning Primary Collecting Responsibility as follows:

TABLE 3. GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF PRIMARY COLLECTING RESPONSIBILITY

Institution	Geographic area
Cornell	Jakarta, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, West Java
Hawaii	East Indonesia including Irian Jaya
Michigan	Yogyakarta, Central Java
NIU	Bali
Ohio