The Roja Muthiah Research Library
A private archive in India
Founded in 1994, the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) exists to provide research materials and facilities for students of South Indian Studies in a variety of fields spanning the humanities and the social sciences. The library's main objectives are to preserve, catalogue and expand the collection of Roja Muthiah who, during his lifetime, built one of the world's finest private libraries of Tamil publications.
By S. THEODORE BASKARAN
An eccentric bibliophile, Roja Muthiah, who started his life as a painter of signs, spent much of his family's fortune collecting every scrap of published literature he could find in Tamil, his native language. He began his collection in 1950 at his village Kottaiyur, located at the most southern point of India. When he died in 1992, the collection consisted of 100,000 rare books, journals and newspapers, and thousands of clippings.The subjects range from indigenous medicine, religion, folklore, cinema, drama, women's studies, and popular music. The collection includes other printed matter such as theatre handbills, film songbooks, wedding invitations and private letters. The various ages of the materials in the collection span a period of more than 150 years, the earliest example being a work published in 1804. Therefore, it is considered a unique reflection of Tamil culture, which is concentrated in the southern Indian state of Tamilnadu.
The University of Chicago sponsored the project to found a research library, in collaboration with MOZHI, an Indian trust for resource development in language and culture based in Madras. In 1994, a library containing all his collections was opened in Madras.
During 1995, preliminary electronic catalogue records were created for all the titles in the library and microfilming facilities, for purposes of preserving texts, were in operation. So far, at least 47,000 titles have been catalogued and 10,000 volumes have been preserved on microfilm, and the corresponding cataloguing records will be enhanced with full descriptive data.
Now, fourteen professional librarians staff the library and eight paraprofessionals work there to preserve, catalogue and guide readers at the RMRL. The equipment includes: eight networked computers linked to a RMRL database, all programmed with the capability to display Indian script and have access to the internet; a scanner; compact discs containing all the available electronic records of titles at the Library of Congress. In addition, a fully equipped reprographics facility includes three microfilm cameras, a film duplicator, a film processor and equipment for assessing the quality of microfilm.
The library participates in projects in collaboration with the Tamilnadu Government Archives and the Maraimalai Adigal Library, a private library with a collection of rare books. Titles are taken from these collections and microfilmed at the RMRL.
In a major innovation, the RMRL has adapted technologies developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, India, in order to create machine-readable catalogue records conforming to international standards. The system is capable of generating a variety of catalogue outputs to meet different needs. In the RMRL catalogue, data for Tamil items are entered in Tamil script. The system in use at the RMRL can display and print the catalogue in either Tamil or in Roman script. Data is automatically transliterated into the Roman script both for display and printing out. Catalogue records created at the RMRL can be loaded into major international systems, including that of the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), the largest bibliographic database in the world. *
S. Theodore Baskaran, Director RMRL
E-mail: rmrl@vsnl.com
Http://www.lib.uchicago.edu.libIndo/SourcesBySubject/SouthAsia/rmrl.html