South Asia Union Catalogue

About SAUC

The South Asia Union Catalogue is a cap-stone program gathering existingbibliographic records and combining them with new cataloguing created under currentprojects to create a definitive statement on publishing in the South Asiansubcontinent. The South Asia Union Catalogue intends to become anhistorical bibliography comprehensively describing books andperiodicals published in South Asia from 1556 through the present. In addition,it will become a union catalogue in which libraries throughoutthe world owning copies of those imprints will register their holdings. Scholarsof South Asia in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world will be given free access tothe historical bibliography and the holdings information through the on-line SouthAsia Union Catalogue.

The four phases of the South Asia Union Catalogue program are defined by the regions of book production. Phase I encompasses south India and Sri Lanka. Publications in the Dravidian languages plus Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language, predominate. Phase II covers eastern South Asia and colonial Burma. Most publications are in eastern Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, and Austro-Asiatic languages. Phase III covers north central South Asia, including Nepal. The majority of publications are central Indo-Aryan and the most frequently occurring languages of imprints are Nepali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi with its dialects. Phase IV ranges over western South Asia and includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of northwestern India. Languages of the region include several from the western and eastern Indo-Iranian and western Indo-Aryan families. Most of those languages use the Perso-Arabic script.

Much of the bibliographic data currently included has been provided by the Library of Congress, the South Asia Materials Project at the Center for Research Libraries, the Roja Muthiah Research Library, and the University of Chicago Library's Southern Asia Department.

Specimen entries for the South Asia Union Catalogue demonstrate the use of South Asian regional scripts in bibliographic and authority records.

The Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi, India) undertook a pilot project in 1993 for a Catalogue of Nineteenth-Century Indian Publications. Mr. K. C. Dutt's report on that project includes information that was critically important in planning the South Asia Union Catalogue.

The South Asia Union Catalogue is closely affiliated with the Digital South Asia Library.