The summer, for many academic librarians, brings a lull, and for me that sometimes means that I have the opportunity to travel. Budgets here, as I imagine they are in many institutions, are currently a mess, but I was luckily still able to visit Southeast Asia a few weeks ago. I didn’t do nearly as much purchasing as I would have liked (see the aforementioned budget problems), but I was able to buy a few things and I also met a lot of great people to hopefully collaborate with in the future. So, without further ado, here’s a little bit of what I did on my summer vacation.
Kediri, East Java
My first major stop was Universitas Nusantara PGRI in Kediri, a city in East Java. For the AIFIS-MSU Conference on Indonesian Studies this past June, faculty at the university composed and choregraphed a piece for their students to perform as part of the opening ceremony, drawing on local performing arts traditions. They had a larger festival planned in July, so I, of course, wanted to attend. After I gave a (very embarrassing) speech about the importance of preserving cultural heritage, I relaxed and watched several musical and dance performances presented both by students and by community groups.
History students from the university also took me to see some important historical sites in the area, including Tegowangi Temple, where I met the woman in charge of maintaining the temple. She grew up in the area and it was her father who decided that the temple should be looked after and maintained. Kediri was home to a historically important kingdom in Java and it was fascinating to learn more about this history from the students and to hear what excites them about their studies.
Place Marketing
Everywhere I visited, I also stopped by a tourism information center, or found other ways to pick up place marketing materials for MSU’s collection. This meant everything from wandering through a Jakartan construction site looking for one of many, many malls to visiting an office located inside an Arc de Triomphe lookalike in the middle of Kediri. Collecting place marketing materials is always fun because they’re everywhere but it’s still an adventure hunting them down—a kind of library scavenger hunt.
“Academic” Meetings
Then, of course, there were the more standard library- and academia-focused meetings. I’m hoping to get more involved in collaborating on research with practitioners in Indonesia, either in traditional research collaborations or through other methods such as translating research papers into English so that they can be published for a different kind of audience, so I had several different meetings discussing ideas.
On the library side of things, a highlight was visiting the library of Surakarta’s Grand Mosque. The National Library of Indonesia and the provincial Regional Library have started a program seeking out so-called “hidden” manuscript collections: collections not found in libraries, but instead in private homes or in community institutions such as mosques. I was invited to sit in on a meeting at the mosque to go through their collection and identify which pieces would fit into the scope of the project. I got to see everything from books of tafsir with notes in the margins to student report cards, learned about different kinds of paper and what they signal about time period and preservation, and ferried a lot of archival housings between tables.
When I visit libraries overseas, I try to make note not only of what kinds of materials they have, but also how they can be accessed. If a student comes to me looking for Javanese Qurans, do I know the person they need to contact to gain access? Is there an online catalog? Even better, are there digitized copies available to browse? In the case of the Grand Mosque, there’s as yet only a paper catalog (currently out of print), but there are a large number of manuscripts that have been digitized and made available online.
My other big library meeting was with the Library of Congress field office in Jakarta. The Library of Congress has offices around the world that funnel books back to the US, including to research libraries. I can report that despite everything going on politically in both the US and Indonesia, operations at the field office continue. Shipping costs are rising and there are other unexpected hurdles that come up, but it was heartening to meet with everyone face-to-face and hear how things are going.
Zines
Finally, I planned my itinerary around a zine festival in Jakarta, a city whose zine scene I’ve watched from afar for some time. The festival was held at KONGSI 8, a small studio and café space, but they managed to fit in a good number of vendors as well as a large collection of zines from makers who weren’t present. I had to resist buying everything, and instead focused on political and environmental zines, as well as zines about identity.
Collecting zines for the library helps to provide immediate access to what everyday students, activists, and creators are thinking. The next step, of course, is making sure library users know the zines are available. One thing I’d really like to focus on in the coming year is communicating with students about the library’s zine collection and brainstorming with them ways they can use zines both as sources for their research and as a way of expressing their ideas and findings. But more about that in another post.
What have you been up to this summer? Any interesting projects? Any bright ideas? Are you ready for the fall semester?