LIBRARY
Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium
With a combined total of 721, 275 books and monographs and 9,624 serials and periodicals, the library resources of the consortium represent one of the largest collections of South Asian materials in the country and reflect the different patterns of research and teaching at the two institutions. Syracuse and Cornell both have substantial and complementary collections, with Syracuse's focusing on English-language items and Cornell's split evenly between items in English and South Asian Languages. The total number of library titles at Cornell centering on South Asia is 412, 275, while that at Syracuse is 309, 000. The South Asia collection at Cornell University, with NRC support, was able to add two substantial electronic resources for study and teaching, Empire Online and India, Raj, and Empire in Fall of 2010. Both these sets present original historical documents in fully online and searchable format. The South Asia Collection is processing of the gift collections in Nepali and Newari acquired in 2008. Some 350 monograph titles have been integrated into the collection, many of them held only by Cornell among institutional libraries worldwide. The South Asia Collection is a pilot case in the planning for a strategic partnership between Cornell University Library and Columbia University Library. The project is dubbed 2CUL (pronounced "too cool") and aims to reduce unnecessary duplication of collections. Expedited 2CUL delivery services should make borrowing from Columbia almost as quick as retrieval from Cornell's own Annex facility. A Cornell University Faculty Advisory Committee is working with the Curator for South Asia on the contours of a joint collection with more depth and breadth than either institution could achieve alone.