Dr. James Nye is an intrepid explorer of words. The Bibliographer for Southern Asia at the University Chicago Library, Nye has trawled South Asia for decades, gathering the best quality material to ensure research libraries have access to the most relevant resources.
Nye’s interest in India began way back in 1968, when he started studying Hindi at Yale. His work has brought him to India many times. “Twice a year, for several years,” he says. His interest has now stretched across South Asia and he has been instrumental in documenting and preserving material from the region through two major initiatives: the Digital South Asia Library, at the University of Chicago, and the South Asia Open Archives Initiative (SAOAI), which is backed by The Centre for Research Libraries.
In a telephone interview, Nye says, “We try to make all of our resources open for anyone in the world to use. This is especially true of the Digital South Asia Library when there were very few web resources available and very few dictionaries. There were very few collections of photographic images, very few encyclopaedias. So we focussed on making available excellent quality resources.”
The SAOAI is popular and gets up to 3.5 million hits a month. Dictionaries get the major chunk of those hits. “To take an example, Tamil has five dictionaries, [and there are] four for Marathi language,” says Nye. “We are in the middle of a large project using funding from the U.S. government, to have more dictionaries for other languages. For instance, we are working on Punjabi and Sindhi language dictionaries. The other major development with the dictionaries that we have started is on the language of the Maldives, the Dhivehi language. So the SAOAI is a good resource that is being used very widely.”
Colonial heritage
But it isn’t just about dictionaries; there are maps and audio recordings. Nye and his colleagues have also opened up the SAOAI to include material from the colonial period. “We think that some of the old colonial documents such as the Imperial Gazetteer can be quite a valuable source of information about India. It is quite old, but we’ve made a full digital copy of that.” The role of the bibliographer today has shifted to developing digital resources, since the benefits are available to anyone.
One of the biggest challenges faced by bibliographers is deciding what material to use out of the wealth of resources available to them. “There is never enough money,” Nye says. There are also issues of copyright, around which bibliographers have to tread extremely carefully. Although Nye has had good success dealing with the copyright laws of the Ministry of Justice, it often involves paying the publisher a fee and getting to use their excellent material.
But there is a silver lining: Through all his labours, he has built up a wealth of resource all over South Asia. “The people I work with are my most cherished finds,” he says, naming colleagues in Colombo, Chennai and Karachi, who have gone on to become close friends.
Dr. James Nye will talk on ‘India’s Cultural Wealth: Image, Audio and Publications, an Open Archive for the People’, at the Visitor’s Centre Auditorium, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, today at 6 p.m.
The author is a freelance writer
Bibliographers have
to tread extremely carefully around issues of copyright, says Nye
