In our own world

I was looking for an earlier edition of my father’s book Towards Pakistan online. The book is widely available in the marketplace in Pakistan, but most (nearly all) available copies are unauthorised, thanks to the poor enforcement of copyright laws. The unauthorised copies are a result of illegal photocopying, unauthorised edits, subtractions and additions. The original, authentic copies are only available in libraries or perhaps old bookstores. I was convinced that libraries at universities in Pakistan would have a copy of the edition that I was looking for, and I had been told by friends and family members as such. Yet, when I searched in WorldCat (a global catalogue of libraries of institutions and universities, private and public), most searches, with the exception of one, would point to libraries outside Pakistan that had copies of my father’s book. The only Pakistani library that had a copy showed an edition printed in 2006 (which is unauthorised as my father had passed away in 1988). I knew there was something that was not quite adding up.

I started manually going to the websites of libraries of major universities in Pakistan. Now, I was in for a bigger surprise. A number of major universities, including those which have often been quick to celebrate their national and international rankings, have no online catalogues. They would have an old picture of the library, the total number of holdings, but no catalog that could be searched. The website of the university that my father taught at for several years, and which is a major regional university, has a catalogue site that is “under construction”. With my initial attempts to use WorldCat unsuccessful, I had to go to the website of each university, type in the keywords and wait for the answers to appear on the screen. While I did find it at a few libraries in Pakistan, the catalogues of several large universities were unable to process basic queries (name, title, publisher, etc) or the servers would not respond for a long time and then crash. I was disappointed, and frustrated. This is not how modern libraries should operate. The fact that most libraries would not be fully connected to international databases or have functioning online catalogues is not something that should be acceptable for us in this day and age.

Incidentally, while I was searching the catalogues, the last book of Mukhtar Masood sahib, Harf-e-Shauq, was sitting on my desk. I have long enjoyed his writing and his prose and had been reading his book for sometime. As I picked it up, I noticed that it had no barcode or any ISBN number. The ISBN or international standard book numbers have been in place for nearly half a century to assign a unique identifier to each book. Harf-e-Shauq was published in 2017, not before 1967 when the ISBN numbers were first introduced. I looked for other Urdu books in the house and found most of them without any identifiers as well. Some of the major Pakistani publishers have started using ISBN, but majority of Urdu books published in Pakistan have no such numbers. Our literature, writings and scholarship remain disconnected from the wider world.

There is often discussion about having access to foreign libraries, resources and literature. Those points are all valid and important — but equally important is that our literature and scholarship be accessible to those who seek knowledge. The fact that our libraries remain disconnected from international databases, or do not have functioning electronic catalogues, or that our Urdu books have no ISBN numbers means that either we are unaware of the international systems, unwilling to make the effort, or simply believe that others may not be interested in what we may have to say. All of these arguments are weak and problematic. Nothing justifies being disconnected from the rest of the world of knowledge and inquiry. We do have a lot to say that the world does care about. We just need to make sure they can access what we say.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 16^th, 2022.

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