Last month, a team of six staff from the Civic Initiative (a business group of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Donahue Institute) were in Islamabad. They held a three-day follow-up conference for alumni from recent cohorts of the Study of the U.S. Institutes Comparative Public Policymaking program that has been held annually by the Civic Initiative since 2010. The SUSI program is funded by the US Department of State Education and Cultural Affairs Office.
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PLASP
Two different teams of the Private Library and Archival Survey Project (PLASP) in Pakistan have now visited some fifty collections in several cities and villages of the country's three major provinces. Libraries surveyed include those in Hyderabad, Tando Thoro, and Sann in Interior Sindh, and Attock, Peshawar, Bahawalpur, Muhammadabad, and Faisalabad in the Punjab and Frontier. The famous private collection in rural Vihari near Multan, the Jhandair Library, has also been surveyed. Jhandair is considered to be the largest private library in the entire country.
The Project set as one of its primary aims the availability in a published volume of the entire body of the initial bibliographic data that have been gathered. To this end, PLASP negotiated a publication program with Oxford University Press (OUP) Pakistan. An OUP series of volumes on Pakistan's archives was created under the advisement of PLASP. PLASP and the Interest of the Library of Congress PLASP-Private Library and Archival Survey Project-was launched in the Summer of 2003 aimed at making Pakistan's rich private library holdings better known and more accessible to the research community. It has the additional aim of supporting Pakistan's participation in the recently established Center for South Asian Libraries (CSAL).