by Zoë McLaughlin and Virginia Shih
In 2019 and 2020, Southeast Asia librarians in the United States came together to celebrate the 50th anniversaries of the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA) and the Southeast Asia Materials Project (SEAM). Inspired by this anniversary, we have taken the opportunity to look into the history of Southeast Asia librarianship as well as toward the future.
Southeast Asia librarianship in the United States as we know it today had its roots in increasing interest in the region after the conclusion of World War II. In the 1950s, ALA’s Non-Western Studies Committee was active, with a focus not just on Southeast Asia, but on other areas of the world as well. In 1956, a Ford Foundation grant brought together librarians and institutions with an interest in South and Southeast Asian studies for discussion and collaboration. Through the 1950s and 1960s, this interest in Southeast Asian studies led to the creation of organizations still in existence today, including CORMOSEA and the Center for Research Libraries’s SEAM.
In 2005, funded by a grant from the Department of Education’s Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access program, the Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) was established. SEADL provides open access to materials pertaining to all areas of Southeast Asia, including manuscripts, books, and multimedia such as photographs and videos. In 2019, SEADL received a $1.2 million grant through the Henry Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Southeast Asia for updates and further development. This grant attests to continued support for Southeast Asian library collections and to movement within the community of Southeast Asia librarians to pursue collaborative projects that will maintain the field and grow in new ways as librarianship as a whole changes.
Keeping in mind current trends in librarianship as a profession as well as the changing state of Southeast Asian studies in the United States, we conducted a survey of Southeast Asia librarians to identify common hopes and concerns for the field as well as possible ways forward. The survey was distributed to all Southeast Asia librarians in the US and participation was voluntary.
Challenges having to do with staffing were most frequently expressed. In recent years, there have been some Southeast Asia librarian positions that have been modified to be responsible for other subject areas as well, such as Buddhist studies, or for other geographic areas, such as South Asia. This consolidation of responsibilities under a single librarian means that less time, in general, can be spent focused specifically on Southeast Asian studies. There is also concern that there is not enough foreign language cataloging expertise in the United States to support robust collecting of vernacular materials. While other area studies disciplines, such as East Asian studies, continue to see strong support, Southeast Asian studies librarians must continue to advocate for the importance of the discipline and for the tools necessary to cover such a diverse region.
There is, however, still a consensus on the continued importance of Southeast Asian studies and on possible areas of growth. Continued support for SEADL was expressed, particularly as an opportunity to grow a robust, national, digital collection of Southeast Asian materials. In general, there was also interest in cooperation in other areas, such as in maintaining a robust, national print collection, with the understanding that resources must be preserved but that it is often not feasible to preserve everything at every institution.
Finally, while print collections continue to be vital to area studies collections, interest was also expressed in working together to make freely available electronic resources more findable. Because these items are open access, there has often been less effort put in to indexing them and making them available.
The Luce Initiative on Southeast Asia, which has now awarded ten grants to universities in the United States and Southeast Asia attests to continued interest in Southeast Asian studies. The focuses of the grants, ranging from environmental science and environmental change to social justice to language study to diasporic studies, illustrate the dynamic nature of Southeast Asian studies today and the ways in which the field is expanding and changing. Librarians are working to respond to these changes.
As a new librarian in the field, the results of this survey have helped inform me of my colleagues’ views and hopes for the future. The field Southeast Asia librarianship is small and I share similar concerns about how expertise can be maintained while we change with overall trends in academic libraries and in academia more generally. Personally, I see the opportunity for more fluidity between the fields of area studies and ethnic studies and hope to explore these possibilities more in the future, as a way to grow the field beyond its roots in colonialism. Collaboration will be necessary for the field to continue and I am excited by the possibility of partnerships that have yet to be explored.
We wish to thank the Librarians Association of the University of California for the funding support for our CORMOSEA research project.