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History of the East Asia Library |
The East Asia Library at the University of Washington began in 1937 with a Rockefeller grant to purchase a small collection of Chinese literary works. By 1940, the holdings had increased to 20,800 volumes including a gift of 2,000 volumes from Columbia University and additional purchases made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation. Until 1945, this modest collection - unnamed, uncataloged, and untended - was shelved in the "Oriental Seminar Room" in Suzzallo Library and was available to faculty and students only by request.
With the establishment of The Far Eastern Institute in 1946, the Oriental Seminar Room collection became the Far Eastern Library. Dr. Ruth Krader was appointed as the first curator of the Library in September 1947. The George Kerr collection was acquired in 1948 and formed the basis of the Japanese collection. A small number of Korean titles assembled during World War II for U.S. Army teaching purposes formed the beginning of the Korean collection. In 1950, the Far Eastern Library moved to the basement of Thomson Hall. In 1951, a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled the library to purchase Japanese materials on China. The acquisition of the Joseph Rock and Herbert H. Gowen collections further enhanced the Library's holdings on China and Inner Asia.
The 1960's saw the addition of the Helmut Wilhelm collection of Chinese classics and the Robert Paine collection of Japanese art materials. In 1976, the collection was moved to Gowen Hall and renamed the East Asia Library. The collection continued to grow considerably throughout the 1980's. Automation was also introduced during this period.
Strong growth of the collection has taken place in the first half of the 1990's. We have made substantial progress in the acquisition and provison of electronic information from East Asia, both in online and CD-ROM formats. There are approximately 60 full-text retrieval databases. The library was the first institution outside of the Republic of China to acquire the Twenty-Five Dynastic History database and the first academic library in North America to establish a direct connection to the NACSIS-IR service in Japan.
As of August 2000, the library has over 554,000 volumes of publications on East Asia in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Manchurian, Mongolian, and Western languages.
| © 2000 University of Washington |