James Nye travels to Nepal as a Fulbright Fellow

James Nye, Bibliographer for Southern Asia at the University of Chicago Library, has received a 2018 fellowship under the Fulbright Specialist Program. He was matched with the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Lalitpur, Nepal for developing library and archive resources in the Nepali language. Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, founded in 1955, is the world’s largest collection of Nepali books and periodicals.

During his fellowship, Nye will join in a survey of Nepali collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Palpa, and Lumbini, many of which were severely damaged in the 2015 earthquakes and are still out of service. He will also deliver a public lecture on the history of the book in Nepal, conduct a workshop for professionals on metadata for libraries and archives, engage in an academic roundtable discussion on archives in North America and Europe with holdings on Nepali, and assist colleagues at the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya as they develop a collection development statement and plan for their collection.

The University of Chicago Library holds one of the largest collections of Nepali publications in North America with special strengths in publications from 1960 through the present.