David S Magier is South and Southeast Asian Studies Librarian and director of Area Studies at Columbia University, New York. He is also Columbia University's Internet Training and Resource Coordinator, a position he developed over the last decade.

Magier was an early advocate of using the Internet in higher education and applied his knowledge to develop and organise web pages as tools for research. His South Asia Resource Access on the Internet (SARAI) <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/southasia/cuvl/> is the most comprehensive portal on South Asia and is certified as the WWW Virtual Library for South Asia. The US government's National Endowment for the Humanities also named SARAI "one of the best sites on the Internet for teaching the humanities."

Magier graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics. He then went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in 1983 with a dissertation entitled Topics in the Grammar of Marwari. Magier joined Columbia University as a South and Southeast Asian Studies specialist in 1987. Magier was in Kathmandu recently and Gaurab Raj Upadhaya spoke with him about libraries, research and preservation in the age of digitisation.

What brings you to Kathmandu?
I am president of the Center for South Asian Libraries (CSAL), a collective approach to support libraries in South Asia. Through CSAL we are trying to make collective funding more accessible and promote standards in cataloguing and bibliographic formats so these libraries can connect to the rest of the world.


We work with South Asian libraries to preserve manuscripts and holdings. We microfilm the original volumes, make copies of the original film and store the originals safely. We also scan the microfilm into high quality digital images and put them on the web.

Isn't microfilming archaic ?
You are mistaken, probably because you are from the digital age (laughs). The only proven technology for preservation is filming. Filming technology is sufficiently advanced and we know it can be safely stored for 200 to 400 years. And it can be viewed with just a magnifying glass. You can't do any such thing with digital technology. And we are making copies of the microfilm for distribution-which again entails lower costs for libraries.


As the dynamics of technology change, distribution mediums and formats may change-but electronic access is not possible if materials are not preserved. In the US, there is a place called Iron Mountain, where everything that has been published in the US is microfilmed and stored underground-that's for preservation.


We are using information technology to catalogue library holdings according to standards, and bring uniformity in electronic catalogues. This will ultimately help create a union list, which lists all available holdings in all libraries. Inter-library loans will then be possible.


Most digital technology is developed in the West, and places like Nepal are deprived of the benefits because of the lack of technology in local languages. How dos this impact libraries cataloguing South Asian volumes?
Local adaptation is not necessarily a problem-the major problem is standardising encoding for fonts and scripts. Many non-Roman scripts have been already standardised and are widely used, but many South Asian ones haven't been. But, with the use of something called Unicode spreading, librarians are finding it easier to store information in local languages that are compatible across fonts. But then again the coding often does not reflect the way languages here are used, so more work needs to be done in South Asia itself.


Do you think donors could support this kind of work?
Right now, digitisation seems to be in vogue. But donor agencies fail to understand that digitisation is only for distribution. If you want preservation, you need to give libraries more money. Even we talk about digitisation to have easier access to funds. But libraries need to first preserve, then digitise. Donors and agencies need to put their money where it will make a real difference-like in preservation and standardisation of encoding.


How is your work different from that of Western scholars and libraries in the past?
In the past Western scholars would come in and carry away value. It was like a colonial plunder dream-you took away books because you could buy them. Libraries also took back holdings. But no library can work in isolation. Not even a big library can come and take back everything of value. And with information technology and Internet, geography matters less and less. Libraries can promote the ethic of co-operation, users can benefit. Once items are preserved, they can be distributed in many different forms including on CD-ROM and online.

So some libraries are changing their approach. How much are libraries themselves changing?
When you asked someone 100 years ago: "What is a library?," they would say something like a centre for knowledge, but I see library as a warehouse of materials. How they serve the society and their clients depends on what their mission is. Those are two different things, just like preservation and distribution are. Libraries, if they are not co-operating, offer their clients less-which goes against their mission. So libraries are forming federations, facilitating inter-library loans. In this case, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

With the Internet being touted as the best resource centre-for anything-where do libraries stand?
I can tell you that only about 1/100th of all written documents are online. Actual research can't be done without a library. Music, the arts, development research, history are things that are preserved only in libraries.

But aren't more people inclined these days to use electronic resources?
Yes, and it troubles me. People who grew up with technology don't want to go through shelves of books, they want everything on screen. But only those volumes that are in high demand have been digitised, so if you are looking for rare works there is little chance you will find them. I think that if this continues, research will become shallow. It took me 15 years to assimilate the South Asia collection at Columbia, it would take much more time to make the hundreds of thousands collection available on the Internet.

You also run the WWW Virtual Library for South Asia, how did that start?
I started using the Internet in 1978-I was one of the first to use it at Columbia. Since I am the South Asian librarian, I started putting up gopher resources on the Internet. That was in early 1988. Gopher was the way information was shared and published electronically before web. The online library I started became very popular and organisations like the Library of Congress started contacting me asking if they could connect to it and contribute to it. It kept growing and became the authority on SA resources on the Internet.


When the WWW started in 1991, I was reluctant to migrate because it was not as effective as a gopher. But increasingly resources started to become available on the web, and even old resources migrated to it. Mine was the last functioning gopher service at Columbia, but eventually I migrated too and so the SARAI (South Asia Resource Access on the Internet) was born. Much later, the WWW Virtual Library guys from Switzerland contacted me, and I agreed to be the South Asian portal for the library.


Now I am also involved in the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) which seeks to expand access to unique South Asian resources by providing full-text documents, electronic images and indices in South Asian languages.