The Cambridge South Asian Board was set up in 2017. It is one of the larger regional Cambridge librarian advisory boards and currently has 23 members, 22 of whom represent Indian institutions, with one member from Bangladesh.  In future we hope to gain a few more members from South Asian countries outside India.

The board first met in New Delhi in the autumn of 2017. The meeting was high-spirited and energetic and proclaimed a huge success by everyone who attended. Afterwards the board members said that although they had served on other publishers’ boards, they felt that only Cambridge was really interested in what they had to say. Other publishers’ board meetings were more about sowing the seeds for new product sales than providing a forum for the genuine exchange of ideas and experiences. The board subsequently met in 2018 and 2019. Board members have engaged in four webinars since the Covid epidemic made travel impossible.

Indian and Bangladeshi librarians are very keen to promote their institutions and work hard to keep abreast of the new developments taking place in academic libraries across the world. Many of the South Asian board members are extremely well-travelled and, because of their well-informed insights into the higher education issues that the world’s fifth largest economy is currently addressing, are often asked to speak at conferences in the USA, Europe and Australia.

Their career trajectories are frequently more unusual than those of librarians in the west. This post focuses on the distinguished career changes of two South Asian board members, Dr Rangashri Kishore and Dr M G Sreekumar.

Dr Kishore spent some time in the UK this winter, so we were fortunate to be able to welcome her the first face-to-face advisory board meeting we had held for almost two years, primarily for the UK and European board members, in Cambridge last December. When she joined the South Asian board, she was the founding director of Ashoka University Library and prior to that the Dean of Library Services at Krea University. However, for the last fifteen months she has been the Regional Director for Read India South. She explains how this radical career change came about:

“Throughout my career, I have worked at the interface of library and information services, healthcare and education, to help bring about meaningful changes in the communities we work in.  Alongside my profession as a librarian, I am also a mental health advocate and have co-founded three half-way homes in India for the rehabilitation of people living with chronic mental illnesses. I have always been passionate about community work and the social sector. This means I have also imposed significant challenges on myself; but addressing them brings me the equally significant satisfaction of creating long-lasting change. The pandemic has served to illuminate the huge unmet needs in this sector – from funding and resources to research and education; and, most importantly, has highlighted the contribution of people who care to make a difference.” Dr Kishore’s most recent project at Read India was to establish a new community library in Vijinapura, a disadvantaged region in Bangalore which usually attracts little aid, by bringing together diverse collaborators to provide skill development programmes for women and others staying in health camps during the pandemic.

Dr M G Sreekumar is also a founding member of the South Asian board. When he joined, he was Chief Librarian and Information Officer and Adjunct Professor at IIM Kozhikode, a post he held for almost a quarter of a century. Dr Sreekumar is a well-known career librarian who has trained at and gained awards from some of the world’s most famous universities. One of his objectives has always been to ‘give something back’. Among the many initiatives he has engaged in were the setting up of a consortium to support all India’s IIM libraries and leading the Greenstone Digital Library Software support for the South Asia Region on behalf of UNESCO.

In 2019 Dr Sreekumar was invited to participate in a workshop for librarians held at the JIO Institute, which is a multidisciplinary research university created on a philanthropic basis by Reliance Industries Ltd and the Reliance Foundation. Its inception in 2018 was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Government of India, which issued a Letter of Intent to give it the status of a Greenfield Institute under UGC (Institutions of Eminence Deemed to be Universities) Regulations. Towards the end of 2020 Dr Sreekumar was offered the post of Director of Libraries at the Institute, a post which he took up in January 2021.

The founders of the Institute have ambitious plans to provide nation-wide scholarly support in India through making the resources academics need available everywhere, and to achieve this by using cutting-edge IT and digital library technologies. One of the library’s projects is to promote outreach opportunities by developing special collections. The three collections currently under development are Indian Arts, Architecture, Culture and Heritage; the History of Bombay; and the Covid-19 Archive.

Dr Sreekumar says: “The primary reason for my acceptance of this exciting job is sheer passion for professional excellence, and the unique opportunity to contribute to the higher education academic landscape of my country in a more impactful and influential manner.”

Both Dr Rangashri and Dr Sreekumar are committed to bringing information, scholarship, pride in India’s culture and personal development opportunities to as wide an audience as possible. Cambridge is privileged to be able to benefit from their contributions to the South Asian Librarian Advisory Board.