College and Research Libraries


Putting the House in Order 

SINCE EARLY 1962 the American Librar-
ies Book Procurement Program for India 
and Pakistan, directed by the Library of 
Congress and financed through PL 480 
funds, has been purchasing, partially 
processing, and distributing selected books 
and periodicals to a small number (less 
than twenty) of American libraries. The 
publications are in English, Bengali, Hin-
di, and Urdu; they are representative of 
the English-speaking public and of the 
literate and expressive writers in the ver-
naculars of the entire subcontinent-ex-
cepting only the Tamil-Telegu-speaking 
portion of South India. 

Other institutional libraries receive, by 
individual effort, some of these publica-
tions; and all receive a great deal of other 
material by independent purchase, gift, or 
exchange. The total linguistic range is 
certainly not limited to the four languages 
above mentioned: these just happen to be 
the current official American interest. 

A few angles in this program are dis-
turbing and deserve mention: ( 1 ) news-
print, ( 2) vernaculars, and ( 3) library 
problems. 

1. Newsprint and book papers are in 
very short supply in both Pakistan and 
India. Indigenous raw materials for pulp 
are more essentially used as housing and 
fodder thim for papermaking. The "ubiq-
uitous bamboo" is converted to housing 
from Bengal eastward. Some people, in-
cluding the United States Aid Mission, 
hoped to use the plant surplus for pulp, 
only to be disappointed about three years 
ago when the bamboo flowered and-
true to its nature-died immediately. Sev-
eral years' delay in the availability of a 
surplus was the result. Cane from the 
sugar plantations is animal fodder, but 
in southeast India another of the inter-

NOVEMBER 1964 

BY KATHARINE SMITH DIEHL 

Miss . Diehl is assistant professor at the 
Graduate School of Library Service, Rut-
gers. 

national assistance projects was concerned 
with utilizing it. Trees are in short sup-
ply, are distant from the paper mills, or 
are hard to obtain-as those in the Sun-
darbans which must be harvested from 
very watery delta lands. Also, trees are 
used for railroad ties and are even more 
basic as sources of food: mangos, lichis, 
walnuts, citrus, almonds, neems, and 
tamarinds. Furthermore, there has to be 
natural shade in the tropics! 

This pulp shortage results in very ex-
pensive books and journals. Their cost is 
quite out of the economic range of local 
citizens who would be interested in read-
ing them. The result is a product which 
is of less sound quality than western 
books and journals. What seems to be 
shoddy workmanship is the fault of the 
national purchasing power-the lack of 
foreign exchange for such things as paper 
from Norway-and not of the editor or 
publisher or author. They want nice pa-
per; they want nice and clear illustrations; 
they want good bindings-but they can-
not have them because credit is more 
wisely used in the national interest for 
other things. 

In addition to the high cost, published 
editions are small. It is quite unlikely 
that, after the first mailing of journals, 
copies will remain available for more 
than a few weeks. Editions of one thou-
sand are very common; and in some cir-
cles a thousand copies is unrealistically 
high for a scholarly publication. Except 
for a very few firms which apparently 
have sterling or dollar credit which they 
can tap, books, too, are printed in small 

491 



editions. Government documents get pre-
ferred treatment and, judging by many 
of these titles, the nurture is deserved. 
The Indian National Bibliography, the 
numerous JUTE publications from East 
Pakistan, and most museum publications 
are nice-even substantial. 

As a cumulative result of shortage of 
raw materials, libraries in the United 
States interested in securing journals face 
the loss of occasional copies and inability 
to secure replacements. Surface mail ne-
cessitates a waiting period of up to three 
months; air mail costs would be exhor-
bitant and delivery unreliable. Files of 
journals which are produced on imper-
manent material are real problems, but 
if we are serious about wanting them, 
there is need to be actively interested in 
finding some solution. 

2. The vernaculars and scripts of Asia 
are almost numberless. Though many 
persons have enjoyed long years in the 
subcontinent without knowing their vo-
cabularies, the people who belong there 
are usually multilingual, and those per-
sons who are literate are usually compe-
tent in several scripts. Pakistan has two 
major languages and one minor: Bengali, 
in Devanagari character; Urdu, in Per-
sian character; and English, in Roman 
character. India has fourteen major lan-
guages in about five major characters, 
English in Roman characters, plus the 
vernaculars and characters of the large 
immigrant populations from China and 
Tibet. Unfortunately, India's political di-
visions were drawn along linguistic boun-
dary lines, state documents are issued in 
each state's language and characters; and 
a state language often may not be under-
stood by a person two states removed. 
UNESCO and USIS have officially en-
couraged the implementation of the local 
languages. The British Council, on the 
other hand, has strongly encouraged Eng-
lish, thus recognizing the urgency of need 
for a lingua franca. 

There is thus no universal language of 
any South Asian country. That library 

which receives ten Hindi language jour-
nals is getting but slight coverage. Jour-
nals in English, too, are excellent and de-
serve receipt. They are usually written 
and edited by western-oriented scholars 
who are in effect bridges between the 
East and ~he West. 

Library problems with books in He-
brew, Russian, Greek are no longer with 
us. Books in these vernacular alphabets 
get routine treatment along with books 
in Roman letters. There is no validity in 
placing all the books in Hindi character 
in HINDI (as subject) or Hindi (as clas-
sification) . One large library, to the cha-
grin of the librarian-in-charge, has been 
doing that. Books in the Cyrillic alphabet 
are not placed in 491.7 any more than 
all Roman-letter texts are placed in 470! 

One of the several large libraries in 
Asia, the University of Dacca library, 
uses letters preliminary to the class num-
ber to designate language. This segre-
gates materials without neglecting subject 
arrangement: e.g., a book by Md. Karim 
written in Bengali and bearing the title 
Economics would be numbered B330K; 
were the book in Urdu it would be num-
bered U3 30K. 

The basic problem for libraries is the 
intellectual unreadiness of librarians for 
these books. We are illiterate in the grav-
est manner. We do not know the letters 
of the alphabets; no schedules of the al-
phabets are available; we have not the 
slightest notion what the roots of the lan-
guages are; we throw off the whole mat-
ter with a single word, "exotic," when in 
fact, they are no more exotic than French, 
Greek, Russian, or English if one hap-
pens to have been born in China, Hun-
gary, or Thailand. It was but a few years 
ago that the United States State Depart-
ment began to consider language study 
essential to its program-a detail the 
Soviet Union had not neglected. 

Actually the PL 480 book procure-
ment program ht;ts not placed great onus 
on the recipient libraries. The project 
may be here today and gone tomorrow. 

492 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



John Charles Finzi, however, is working 
at it in New Delhi as if it were to last 
forever. If the institution served by the 
recipient library exerts pressures, and 
if the teaching departments use the mate-
rials, there will be reasonable hope that 
the flow of books will outlive the public 
support, no matter how long that support 
may continue. But unless teaching de-
partments require the Orientalia, libraries 
will not process it, and unless libraries 
process it, teaching departments will not 
require it. This appears to be a circle; 
it is not. Libraries are service agencies 
and have an obligation to make their 
receipts available to their legal public. 
A library is morally obligated to secure a 
person for its staff who can do the neces-
sary work in these languages of Asia. 
This printed matter deserves the same 
kind of subject analysis as Roman-letter 
texts receive. 

In addition, the library is under obliga-
tion to find some · way of filling gaps in 
serial files. Just to say "Do not claim" 
is unsatisfactory to the serious reader. 
Photographic resources are available, and 
if some kind of union serial1 file were to be 
published, copies could be made either 
individually or cooperatively. 

Mter people know what is available, 
indexing is required. Much local house-
keeping, local cataloging, and definition 
of local needs for scholars within each 

1 Efforts are under way at the University of Chi-
cago to prepare a union catalog of serials published 
since partition in India. Further information can be 
obtained from the history department, University of 
Chicago. 

university or metropolitan community 
must be completed. Only after there has 
been an attempt at cataloging, will some 
of the problems of indexing arise; Indic 
and Muslim names are one great and fan-
tastic example. Librarians in Asia have 
not yet settled this; how can those who 
do not even know the alphabet determine 
the important part of a person's name! 

The library profession, 1t would seem, 
must take a bit of responsibility for di-
recting linguistically capable young li-
brary school students into this area of 
special studies. Recently, graduated li-
brarians could be attached, under the 
Fulbright program as research scholars, 
to the Universities of Dacca and the Pun-
jab (East and West Pakistan: Bengali 
and Urdu respectively) and the Univer-
sity of Delhi (India: Hindi) for the ex-
press purpose of language study. Each of 
these universities has teaching programs 
in librarianship; each has graduates from 
American accredited library schools on 
its faculty and staff; each has good library 
facilities, and good language teachers. It 
may take a bit of sorting out to find the 
students who will accept the responsi-
bility seriously and who will determine to 
learn the language. 

The resources are available in this 
country for language study; American 
libraries are receiving books in Asian lan-
guages. These books require honest an<,l 
concerted attention which librarians are 
obligated to give. 

•• 

Population Parlay for Library Planners 

Expenditures for colleges & universities 
Number of college & university students 
Increase over decade earlier 
High school students 

1953-54 

2.2 million 

6.8 million 

1963 

$9.3 billion 
4.5 million 
2.3 million 

1973 
(projected) 

$16.5 billion 
8 million 
3.5 million 

16 million 

(Source: Higher Education and National Affairs, September 24.) • • 

NOVEMBER 1964 493