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Coming Soon: South Asia Comic Collection

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I recently sat down with Mara Thacker, the Library’s South Asian Studies Librarian, to talk with her about one of the Library’s newest collections, the South Asia Comic Collection. The South Asia comics are “part of an initiative to develop a national specialized research resource for students, instructors, and scholars interested in these materials… [It] expands on the Library’s existing popular culture collection.” [i] The following post is an edited version of our interview.

South Asia Comics from the U of I Library

Clockwise from top Right: Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar’s “Sita’s Ramayana,” Amar Chitra Katha’s “Mahabharata,” Shekhar Kapur’s “Devi vol. 2,” and Manjula Padmanabhan’s “Double Talk.”

When did the Library begin to collect South Asian comics? And why did you begin the collection?
This is a new project we declared in October 2012. We participate in a cooperative acquisitions program [ii] with the other South Asia librarians and people that participate in our professional organization. This past year, the project was to identify an area of specialization, declare that for your university, and commit to collecting these materials and to the that it is possible making them available. When I was looking at options for what Illinois could specialize in, comics seemed like a good choice because David Ward, in the Undergraduate Library, had approached me about Indian comics and as I investigated things I realized that there were not a lot of holdings in the U.S. that seemed to be easily available. I realized that it was an area that was really under collected on a national level, there was somebody who could partner [and] provide an extra little financial incentive, and also something niche enough that I think we could fully cover and start from the beginning.

Was the tie in the Undergraduate’s comic collection one of the main factors for why you started this collection?
It was certainly helpful. When you are picking an area of specialization like that, you have a lot of freedom to pick something that interests you and that you think is fun. I have a little bit of back ground in visual culture and popular culture studies, so I think comics are fascinating and a growing area of interests in the academy. But I had to have something that was budgetarily feasible, so having a partnership with the Undergraduate Library, knowing that there is a place for this collection to be housed, certainly helped. And if David Ward and the Undergraduate Library had said, ‘No, we can’t deal with the volume of this,’ or ‘No, we’re not interested,’ then I don’t know that I would have proceeded.

How big is the collection right now? Have you started collecting?
The comic industry in India is not huge. As I said that was one reason we selected that as an area because we could do some retrospective collecting and get a fair portion of what’s available. What we have so far, or most of what we have, I got on a buying trip to India. I went in January to February 2013, and I actually went to Comic Con in New Delhi and bought everything that was available, which wasn’t as much as you would think. I was also at the Delhi book fair and I bought the full run of Amar Chitra Katha comics. Actually, those are pretty widely held; they’re the one sort of anomaly of Indian comics, … but for some of the other comics, like Raj Comics and Diamond Comics, to name a few, they’re not necessarily widely available, so I picked up whatever was available at the book fair.

We have 371 Amar Chitra Katha comics from the buying trip, never mind what we may have already had. The 173 titles form Raj Comics, those are mostly in Hindi. We have 85 from miscellaneous publishers; those are often one-off graphic novels. And then we have 30 from Diamond Comics. There are a couple other publishers and character series that we hope to pick up as we go along.

So roughly 500 or so?
More than. I think just over 600. And we did have some stuff already that has come in over the years from other places, mostly graphic novels.

The comics that were already here, are you going to try to move them into the collection, house them all together? Or is it going to be spread out across the University libraries?
I haven’t decided if I’m going to move things that we have already bought or if it’s going to be moving forward a new policy. I know that everything we bought, starting in October, is going to go in the Undergraduate Library graphic novel and comic collection. We have talked about if we get some older comics and some rare comics, you know from the 60s, 70s, or earlier, it may be more appropriate to put them in Rare Books. But I’m not sure if it would be a mountain of work to try to identify everything that’s elsewhere and move it. That’s a decision to be made later.

We talked a little bit about what is in the collection already. You mentioned the Amar Chitra Katha Comics and those from Raj and Diamond, are they mainly graphic novels? Are they superhero comics? Are they political cartoons and comic strips? Are they all of the above?
All of the above. Raj Comics are superhero comics mostly. The Diamond Comics are more like the Archie and Jughead kind of thing in the sense that they are sort of family friendly and cutesy, but still on that pulpy paper. But then we’ve gotten quite a few graphic novel comics from Pop Cracker and Campfire, and those are more along the lines of Neil Gaiman and those sorts of U.S.-based graphic novels.

You mentioned before that some of the Raj Comics are in Hindi, are there other languages besides English and Hindi in the collection?
Right now just English and Hindi. We will expand to other languages as it becomes possible. The Amar Chitra Katha comics are available in a ton of the different languages of India and I think they could come with the cataloging done. But one of our issues is that we don’t have a huge amount of South Asian language expertise in cataloging right now. So processing things in languages other than English is more challenging. Even the Hindi is challenging, we just have a temporary person helping with that. And they’re not really in WorldCat, which is a problem.

Are you limiting the collection only to India for right now? Are you going to expand to other South Asian countries?
Hopefully, we can expand. I don’t know how big the comic industry is in other countries. I met a librarian from Pakistan that I asked about comics and I don’t think the industry is as large as it is in India, which is still a relative term, because compared to East Asia and the U.S. comics are still pretty small. It would be nice to have comics from all of the South Asian countries but India was sort of the low hanging fruit for a starting point.

How does the comic collection fit in with the rest of the South Asian collection?
In terms of popular culture items, we do have a pretty decent popular film collection for South Asia, mostly India and mostly Hindi, but also the other languages of India. So I think it fits in well in that regard and we also collect South Asian literature. Comics are that interesting middle ground between visual artifacts and textual artifacts so it fits in with the other things that we collect more generally in that way.

I know the Libguide gives a list of subject terms to search in the catalog, but it’s a little difficult to find them sometimes. Are you going to have some sort of designator especially for the Indian comics so that users can browse through them in the catalog?
I don’t know what subject term we would use. We talked about having some sort of subject or some sort of tag, but we’re not at that phase yet. Actually, all of this is taking a bit longer than I expected.

I just asked because when I was looking, I used, or tired to use, the subject terms from the Libguide and it was hard to find them.
Well most of them aren’t in there yet. Actually, nothing from the buying trip is in the catalog yet. I went to India, bought everything they had, brought it back, and realized that we have to get it into the catalog and they’re not in WorldCat. There is probably going to be some original cataloging involved. I’m not a cataloger, but other people don’t necessarily have the South Asia expertise, so it’s [difficult] trying to figure out how to make this collection findable. Luckily we had some protocols, as they figured things out through trial and error setting up the the graphic novel and comic collection for the English language materials, so we’ve been able to use that as a model, but we’ve also had to make specific decisions about the way these things should be grouped together.

Do you have a date that they might be available? Because until they’re in the catalog, users can’t access them, right?
We were hoping to have them out sometime in the Fall semester. I don’t know if that is going to happen. Once we give them [Cataloging] the instructions, that’s all well and good, but there’s still no one down there who speaks Hindi. I’m hoping that we can be pleasantly surprised, but it’s a lot of work to have sprung on them.

So changing tracks here, what kind of comics are you most interested in?
I enjoy the re-tellings of the Indian myths. The Devi comics were one of the ones I looked at when I was starting to kind of dip my toe in. I really like the artwork for those; they’re so aesthetically fun. I enjoy those and I think the Amar Chitra Katha and probably the Raj too. The language is a bit easier, the Hindi language, than it would be in a novel, so I think as a student of Hindi I enjoy those to try to improve my language skills. And I hope at some point I can get some of the Hindi students here to discover them.

What are your overall plans for the collection? Do you want to get every single Indian comic out there? Or do you just want to get the big ones and some of the more specialized comics?
Well, at this point, I think that the industry is small enough that it would be feasible to get almost everything. The retrospective stuff is going to be more challenging, at least in terms of getting complete sets. We’ve got all those Raj comics titles; I asked them for a complete set and … they handed me these giant bundles. I get them back [to the U.S.] and start going through them and I realize that they’re not complete when you look at the sequencing for the numbers. But … that was what they had. What I don’t know is how to get my hands on the things that weren’t included in those bundles. So the retrospective stuff, I anticipate being tricky. If there was a collector in India that would like bestow their collection from their childhood upon us that would be a miracle, but I don’t think that is going to happen.

Any other big plans for the collection? Do you want to start including them in the Hindi classes, like you mentioned earlier?
I think that would be pretty cool. I also think it would be interesting if we became a destination for people who are doing research in popular and visual culture. If they came here to use our comics or if we were able to send them through inter-library loan. I’ve been toying with the idea of inviting a speaker or doing some sort of event centered around the collection.

Having Hindi students be aware of it would be great. Having visual and popular culture scholars be aware of it would be great. But part of it too is that fact that, from what I can tell in all of my research, these things have not been comprehensively collected anywhere in North America. Different libraries have different pieces of things, but this is something that in terms of … the national collection, I think it’s an important contribution. Because other than Amar Chitra Katha, they just haven’t been collected and made accessible.

And I don’t think that it’s being done in India either. I think as with other types of popular culture items, it takes awhile to get the respect, I guess. I think comic studies and visual culture studies is pretty legitimate within the academy, but still I don’t think people think to hold onto and preserve and collect these things. Since comic culture isn’t as big in India as it is in Japan, or even Korea and China; I think it just hasn’t been collected.

If someone wanted to start reading Indian comics, where would you suggest they start? Is there any source material you would show them? Or just point them to the Libguide?
The Libguide would be a good starting point, because that will give you a pretty wide range of whatever is there. There is a graduate assistant at the Undergraduate Library who did some pretty deep searching and I did a lot of searching, too. Then together we put together as much of a bibliography as we could. Again there is not a lot out there, but there should be some good starting points there.

Any other points you want to highlight about the collection?
Just that I hope it will be available sooner rather than later. It’s been a very complex project. It’s started with ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ and now it’s a lot of work. So it’s not all fun and games with a comic collection.

[i] South Asia Comic Collection. Libguide. http://uiuc.libguides.com/southasiancomics
[ii] South Asia Cooperative Collection Development Initiative. 2012 Summary Report and Outcomes. http://www.library.wisc.edu/guides/SoAsia/2012Report.pdf

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The Spring Since 2010: Conflicts, Demonstrations, and Civil Wars in Arab World

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Often taking as an allegory to the “Springtime of the People” or the Prague Spring in 1968, the term “Arab Spring” was “unintentionally coined in a January 6, 2011 article” by Marc Lynch. From the end of 2010 to the present, the calls for revolution from the Arab world only grew stronger. Demonstrations, protests, and even wars have broken out in countries such as Tunsia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and lately, Iraq. More seem to be following in many parts of the world.

Often attributed to the dissatisfaction of local governmental rule, the Arab Spring has been a point of interest to both academics and the populous – a movement that is both reaffirming and changing history. Although the waves of protests are not a new phenomenon, through the movement, this revolution has been turned towards the problems within the Arab society, rather than ending the liberation from colonial rule.

Continuing demonstration on Monday, January 28th captured via a camera phone. (Mostafa El Shemy/AP)

Internationally, various countries and people have reacted differently to Arab Spring. Overall, the protests have attracted support from the international community while the governmental responses were met with condemnation. Moreover, the Arab Spring has, over the past few years, been an inspiration to social movements in other countries, including the Occupy Movement across the world. Marking the continuation of Arab Spring, the escalation of protests continues even today.

Curious about the progression of Arab Spring for these past two years? From February 4th to the 28th, the International and Areas Study Library and the Middle East and North African area specialist will be showcasing the major players and events that brought forth the movement, as well as related library resources in the Marshall Gallery on the 1st floor of the Main Library. And, for more information and readings regarding Arab Spring, there is a guide maintained by the UIUC library as well as multitudes of resources maintained by collaborating scholars across the field.

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Exploring the European Digital Library

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In November of 2008 the European Union unveiled the European Library, a digital repository to preserve and make accessible Europe’s multitude of cultural materials.  Like all libraries big and small the European Library strives to provide free and open access to information for individuals all over the world. However, examining how the European Library obtained support and funding from EU officials reveals that digital libraries and the digitized items that they hold can be of immense political and historical significance.

What Is It?

An all access web portal, the European Library has a single search box which enables users to freely search for resources within the online catalog systems of “Europe’s leading national and research libraries.”[1] The online library provides users with free access to over 200 million bibliographic records and resources of which include artwork, maps, manuscripts, photos, films, and books from all over Europe.

A screen shot of the European Library homepage.

A screen shot of the European Library homepage.

Owned by the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), the European Library has contributions from all of Europe’s 48 National Libraries and a growing number of research libraries. In its most basic form the European Library serves as an aggregate for Europe’s national libraries and archives by providing researchers with bibliographic and digital records for the items each user searches for. The European Library also allows for the downloading of its metadata content free of charge for data mining and exploitation purposes.

Why Does This Matter?

The European Library has evolved from a number of earlier library projects such as GABRIEL (Gateway and Bridge to Europe’s National Libraries) or TEL (The European Library). For years EU officials, while sympathetic and admiring of the idea behind the European Library, did not support the digitization project on the grounds that it was too expensive and that resources for the preservation of European culture would be better allocated elsewhere.  However, in 2005 Google announced the Google Books Project  which works to digitize works from America’s top libraries in order to make them freely available to the public. With Google’s announcement came immediate concern from “EU officials and cultural commentators” who voiced “that Google’s ambitious plans could result in important European literary works missing out and being lost to future generations.”[2] In fact, head of the French National Library from 2002-2007, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, claimed “Google’s plans could lead to a US-centric record of great literary and cultural heritage, neglecting diverse works in different languages.”[3]

Jeanneney’s concern for the implications of Google’s digitization are articulated in his book Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View From Europe. Indeed Jeanneney’s writing and criticisms give voice to an important issue that arises during the digitization process: what do we choose to digitize? This is an important question that libraries, cultural institutions, and corporate donors are facing.  Digitization projects are costly, time consuming, and labor intensive and it is inevitable that not every item in a library collection can be digitized. Nevertheless it is important to pay attention to the selection and funding processes that affect which items are chosen for digitization.

An image of Jean-Noel Jeanneney, former president of the French National Library (2002-2007), who helped raise support for the European Library.

Books, paintings, maps, and other cultural resources that are digitized can be made available over the Internet and therefore spread to anyone individual who has access to a computer. And because of the increasing use of computers and technology to transmit information the digitization of cultural materials, though not a perfect solution is powerful in that it provides institutions with the opportunity to make their collections more accessible to the world. Thus institutions that do (or can afford to) digitize their materials are in a powerful position to affect the historical memory for researchers of the future. For what we choose to digitize and make accessible today will be what digital library users of the future consider history. It is an important issue with serious historical and even political ramifications.

After Google’s Book Project announcement support and funding for the European Library began to grow amongst EU officials signifying that perhaps they do understand the ramifications of digitization and how it can affect the historical record. Next time you use a digital library like the European Library, or the Afghanistan Digital Library, or read a digitized book off of Google Books think about what sorts of books, artwork, and other items of cultural worth did not get digitized and what that could mean for the future.

Sources Cited & Consulted

“About – The European Library.“ The European Library: Connecting Knowledge. 2012. 9 Dec. 2012 http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/aboutus

“FAQs – The European Library. “ The European Library: Connecting Knowledge. 2012. 9 Dec. 2012 http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/faq

“History – The European Library. “ The European Library: Connecting Knowledge. 2012. 9 Dec. 2012 http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/history

“Support for EU ‘digital library’” BBC News. 4 May 2004. Web. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4512831.stm

Carvajal, Doreen. “European Libraries Face Problems in Digitalizing.” New York Times. 28 Oct. 2007. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/technology/28iht-LIBRARY29.1.8079170.html

 

[1] “About – The European Library. “ The European Library: Connecting Knowledge. 2012. 9 Dec. 2012 http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/aboutus

[2] “Support for EU ‘digital library’” BBC News. 4 May 2004. Web. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4512831.stm

[3] Ibid.

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Bollywood 100 years

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Bollywood is the informal, and sometimes controversial, term used for the Hindi-language film industry. The term is controversial because it comes with the implication that the Hindi film industry is a [poor] imitation of Hollywood and also because it is often incorrectly used to refer to the entire Indian film industry. In fact, Hindi cinema has a long history and has its own unique set of aesthetics and conventions.

The Indian film industry started in the early 20th century. The country’s first silent feature full-length film, Raja Harishchandra, was produced in 1913 by film pioneer Dhundiraj Govind Phalke. Modern Bollywood began in 1931 with India’s first sound film, Alam Ara.[i] During the 1930s and 40s, the Indian film industry was suppressed by the Great Depression, but in 1946-1955 Bollywood saw its golden age. As Indian won its independence from British in 1947, film producers were kindled by the passion of a free new nation to build their own film industry. They threw off the restraints of the British studio system to take the reins of their own cinema.[ii]

The expansion of television in the 1980s was a major blow to the Hindi film industry, just like film industries across the world. To survive the spread of television, Hindi cinema focused on producing spectacle that small screens cannot achieve. Entering the new millennium, Bollywood produces an increasing quantity of films. Right now Bollywood is the film base that is producing the largest number of films around the world, ranging from 800-1000. It also sells the largest number of tickets.

Throughout Bollywood’s 100 years’ history, it produced numerous high quality and successful films. Some best known Bollywood films of all time are: Salaam Bombay! (1988), Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Devdas (2002), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Veer Zaara (2004), 3 Idiots (2009), etc. Among the mainstream films, Lagaan (2002) won the Audience Award at the Locarno International Film Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 74th Academy Awards, while Devdas and Rang De Basanti (2006) were both nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film.[iii]

lagaan

Lagaan

The best known Bollywood film genres are musicals and dramas. Recent musicals combine traditional Indian dance and singing with some western style dance, including Broadway and MTV’s music videos. The drama films have some preset plots, usually a mixture of star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.[iv]

Bollywood’s influence on Indian people’s life cannot be overemphasized. Both its popular music and fashion industry are driven by films, for instance the film Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!(1994) transformed the nation’s wedding attire.[v]

Bollywood films are popular across the South Asian sub-continent, including the countries of Bengal, Nepal, and Pakistan. They are also popular among the Persian Gulf countries, some South African countries, Russia, and gaining increasing popularity in U.S and U.K.

If you want to check out Bollywood movies for yourself, you can browse the Library’s collection of Hindi film (with English subtitles) in the Undergraduate Media Collection. Click here to browse them.

 

[i] Bamzai, Kaveree. Bollywood Today. New Delhi : Lustre Press, Roli Books 2007.

[ii] Bamzai, Kaveree. Bollywood Today. New Delhi : Lustre Press, Roli Books 2007. P15.

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HathiTrust Digital Library for World Scholars

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HathiTrust Logo

The HathiTrust Digital Library, which is a consortium of libraries working to digitize and make available a wide variety of cultural documents, has recently won an important “Fair Use” victory in court. What HathiTrust is doing is now legally considered “transformative,” but for researchers, HathiTrust has already been very transformative.

HathiTrust has currently digitized over 10 million volumes of which less than half are in English. (See more HathiTrust statistics.) There are languages from Abkhazian to Zuni for the multilingual researcher to explore. Not all HathiTrust books, however, are available to everyone.  Some books are not yet in the public domain, so they are only searchable and not fully readable.

To get started exploring the HathiTrust’s rich collection of resources, check out a few of their internationally-focused collections:

To search HathiTrust effectively, consider that there are two basic ways to search, catalog search and full-text search. The catalog search function searches the bibliographic record for the item, including title, author, language, date, and basic subjects. The full-text search searches inside the document for words. Both search functions allow you to limit to particular languages, and also to only full-text documents.

The search results for HathiTrust have faceted search on the side, like the University of Illinois’ own VuFind catalog, which allows searchers to refine their results further by subject, date, language, and so on.

For who want to “browse” the collection by call number, like at a physical library, books can be searched by Library of Congress Classification. For instance, those looking for books classified as “Home Economics” would search for “TX.”

The University of Illinois catalog also holds records and links to HathiTrust full-text books, so when you’re searching our catalogs you may notice them in your results.

But the best part about the HathiTrust Digital Library — if you belong to a HathiTrust partner institution (like the University of Illinois!) then you can download free PDF copies of full-text resources!

If you’ve been looking for a way to explore multi-lingual archival material without all of the dust and papercuts, HathiTrust is a great place to start exploring the emerging world of open-access digital archives.

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