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East Asia Library
Newsletter
The East Asia Library Newsletter is a quarterly publication sent to subscribers by email.
Current and archive issues are available below.
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To contact the editor with questions or feedback, email ealnews@u.washington.edu.
| In this issue... | May 6, 2008 |
Collections of the East Asia Library and Their Users: Introduction
Librarian Professional Activities and Staff News
Download the full text of this issue as a PDF.
Information technology is dynamically changing our library, transforming the local library into the global library. Information technology increases the capacity to store, organize, and disseminate information and enables libraries to provide high-quality and diverse services to users. Digital content is growing rapidly in our library collections. Such opportunities have heightened the expectations for librarians, demanding that they reinvent library services and constantly renew their professional skills and knowledge. Chinese studies librarianship, as in other area studies, is a specialized field within library and information science, requiring a combination of subject expertise, language proficiency, and information skills. The rapid growth of electronic publishing and proliferation of e-resources in the Chinese language demand a new set of professional skills of Chinese studies librarians.
Yet the lack of systematic education programs in professional schools has caused the profession to lag behind in meeting the country's need for Chinese studies librarians. The only degree program ever offered on a North American campus was the Joint Program in Far Eastern Librarianship offered at the University of Chicago by the Graduate Library School and the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations. The program conferred doctoral and master's degrees between 1964 and 1979. In the past forty years, there were only three in-depth training programs: the six-week "Institute for Far Eastern Librarianship" at the University of Chicago in 1969; the two-week "Summer Institute on East Asian Librarianship" at the University of Washington in 1988; and the two-week "Luce Summer Institute on East Asian Librarianship: China Focus" at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004. Considering the enormous changes taking place in our libraries, three summer training programs in the past forty years is far from enough.
The University of Washington Libraries will host the Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librarianship in the Electronic Environment, July 19 – August 1, 2008. A major base of Asian studies in North America, the University of Washington offers a world-class Asian studies program with over forty faculty members specializing in Chinese studies. The Jackson School of International Studies has eight U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers for area studies, of which the Center for East Asian Studies is the oldest, with programs dating back to 1909. The University of Washington Libraries is one of the best academic libraries in North America. It received the Association of College and Research Libraries' Excellence in Academic/Research Libraries Award in 2004. The University of Washington Libraries enjoys outstanding leadership of national and international prominence. Betsy Wilson, Dean of the University Libraries, was the recipient of the Association of College and Research Libraries' Librarian of the Year Award in 2007, the highest honor for academic librarians. Many UW librarians are nationally and internationally leading scholars in their respective fields. UW has a world-class East Asian library, with a collection ranking within the top dozen in North America. The university also has a highly ranked Information School. UW's home city, Seattle, is known as a hub of high-tech and information enterprises. All these resources enable the university to play a leading role in providing excellent training programs for Chinese studies as well as other area studies librarians.
The summer institute is truly an international collaboration, bringing resources, efforts, and participants from Taiwan, Mainland China, and North America. Around $50,000 of funding for the institute was raised from private donors in Mainland China and Taiwan. Through collaboration between the University of Washington Libraries and the National Taiwan Normal University, the institute received a grant of $20,000 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. The institute also received a special grant of $25,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation, and a grant of $5000 from the University of Washington Libraries 21st Century Fund.
Thirty-eight Chinese studies librarians have been selected from research and academic libraries in the United States and Canada. The applicants represent a diverse group including senior librarians such as heads of major East Asian collections and relatively new East Asian studies librarians. The faculty of the summer institute is international, including renowned scholars and library professionals from library schools and academic libraries in the United States, Mainland China, and Taiwan. The management team includes leadership of the University Libraries, the iSchool, and the Jackson School of International Studies, as well as the summer institute taskforce of the Council on East Asian Libraries, consisting of members from seven major East Asian Libraries in the US and Canada. The Advisory Committee members are major East Asian librarians in the United States.
The program of the summer institute is international, including a two-day pre-institute Symposium on Chinese Database Standards co-sponsored by the University of Washington Libraries and the Tongfang Knowledge Network Corporation, one of the leading electronic content providers in China; and a two-week post-curriculum field trip to Mainland China and Hong Kong. This Summer Institute will position Chinese studies librarianship in the electronic environment and in the global library. The rigorous, two-week program will cover aspects of Chinese studies librarianship in five areas:
At the conclusion of the summer institute, each trainee librarian will have a better understanding of and more confidence about the digital library for Chinese studies, some useful and practical skills to apply to their work, and better professional connections with fellow trainee librarians and instructors—connections that will serve as resources for their future work.
As part of the closing ceremony, there will be a public colloquium on education and leadership for future academic libraries featuring four prominent leaders and scholars in the library and Chinese studies fields. We believe that in the global library, workforce training must be institutionalized and regularly available to librarians as part of their professional development. We hope the summer institute will help inspire creation of a sustainable model for professional training for East Asian and other area studies librarians.
The collection is the essence of a library regardless what formats the collection takes: print, electronic, or other. Good understanding of how patrons use the library guides collection development and helps libraries build the character of their collections. The East Asia Library at UW has one of the best collections of its kind and enjoys a long and fascinating history, yielding many interesting stories of how users interact with its collections.
In the winter issue of the newsletter, Richard Carkeek wrote a feature article about our Tibetan Collection and its value to a global community of scholars. Inspired by that story, we decided to start a column with focused topics. The current topic is "The Collections of the East Asia Library and their Users." In this column, we tell stories and anecdotes about our collections and how our users interact with them to achieve their research and teaching goals and meet other information needs. Questions from our users also help inspire our library staff to develop new resources and services and to provide better access.
Professor Tani Barlow of Women Studies is one of the frequent users and enthusiastic supporters of the East Asia Library. Professor Barlow not only makes regular use of our collections for her research and teaching but also shares her insights with our staff about collection development and library services. In her article, Professor Barlow tells us a story of her experience at the EAL.
Many years ago I was down in the stacks messing around and I happened on a set of journals that had beautiful color covers and the cartoon sketch on many of them, faded to a highly saturated pastel, starred two women. One woman was older and had a high collar and swept up hairdo. The other had nice big, narrow feet, a long plait or braid down her back and often stood with her face away from the viewer of the image. These turned out to be a fairly complete and incredibly rare set of "Funü zazhi" 婦女雜誌(The Ladies Journal). Because it was one of Shanghai Commercial Press's premiere journals of opinion I ended up exploiting the contents of the journals in the work I was doing at the time. Much of that research came out in my monograph, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Our library has more issues of this magazine than Stanford Library and I don't think Berkeley has any. There are facsimiles of this long running periodical but few original copies in the US, so it was an incredibly lucky find for me. The figures are a proto-modern woman and a proto-modern girl. The girl with the braid often appears in republican era iconography as a figure of the indeterminate but hopeful future that republican women can claim for themselves. Sometimes she is looking out the window. Sometimes she is doing physical activities on her healthy, big feet. Later, I was to find her popping up in advertising images in the early years of the 1920s.
As I was reading through specific issues of the journal I also noticed that it had lots of really interesting advertisements; interesting because they were so, so familiar: Carnation milk, Corn Flakes, Cashmere dusting powder, Colgate toothpaste, Welch's Grape Juice, Sunmaid Raisons etc. etc. etc. When in 2000 then Assistant Professor of History Uta Poiger approached me and asked me for a topic that she, a historian of Germany, and I and Lynn Thomas, an Africanist historian, could jointly collaborate on, I suggested that we take up the question of the "modern girl" and use advertising to do it because advertising has an extralinguistic component that would give a commonality to our project. So one could say that this treasure of an Asian language research library was the origin point of the Modern Girl Around the World collaborative research group.
Since those years I have expanded my interest in the Chinese inter-war advertising world and done a lot of work on the ad industry in selected Chinese cities during those years. I am still interested in the journal and others like it; and our library also has a spectacular run of "Dongfang zazhi" 東方雜誌, "Millard's Review," a handful of original "Liangyou" 良友 (Young Companion) and other original periodicals of my period. But we also have facsimile copies of contemporary journals and newspapers that have proved useful to me both in understanding ad culture and also in showing me the nature and extent of the great debates of the day.
I am in the process of drafting the final chapter of my monograph which is concerned with commodity life, social science, and gender, and my work has been greatly enriched because of our spectacular library and the spectacular librarians who work in it. I am indebted to Richard Carkeek for his kindness and the many suggestions about sources that he has passed my way. I have also benefited enormously from the skilled bibliographic and research acumen of Michael Meng. The East Asia Library and its devoted librarians are a fabulous resource for all researchers.
Mr. Mitsunori Namba, Consul General of Japan, and Ms. Fumiko Okudaira toured the East Asia Library on February 22, 2008 during their visit to the University of Washington. Mr. Namba, who assumed his position as Consul General in January 2008, was particularly impressed with the library's collection on Japanese popular culture, including the wide range of graphic novels. Dr. Zhijia Shen expressed sincere appreciation for the strong support and cooperation from the Consulate General of Japan in promoting cultural understanding between the United States and Japan.
Ms. Funiko Okudaira, Dr. Zhijia Shen, Mr. Mitsunori Namba, Ms. Keiko Yokota-Carter
Other Japanese guests in the library included scholars Mr. Kamino and Ms.Honjo from Musashino Art University. They came to the University to observe the fine arts collections in preparation for a planned remodeling of their own library in the near future.
Six librarians from the Japan Association of Private University Libraries were on campus for three days in March to learn about library services for undergraduate students which are offered by the University of Washington Libraries. They attended presentations by UW librarians, conferred with specialists, and enjoyed a comprehensive tour of the Odegaard Undergraduate Library. The visiting Japanese librarians spoke enthusiastically about their experience at the UW Libraries. Director Zhijia Shen also hosted a lunch meeting with them to elicit their comments and suggestions.(KYC)
The Venerable Lama Tenzin Dhonden visited the East Asia Library on April 2, 2008. A small group of various members of the University of Washington community gathered to meet with him. His visit to the East Asia Library was part of a broader visit to the Libraries in which he viewed part of the Tibetan Collection housed at the East Asia Library and saw the ancient Gandharan scrolls housed in Special Collections that are part of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project.
From left to right: ProfessorTer Ellingson, Lama Tenzin Dhonden, Professor Michael Shapiro, Charles Chamberlain, Richard Carkeek, Mary Schibig, Professor Kent Guy
Our group gathered for tea and snacks in the director's office at the East Asia Library, Charles Chamberlain, Senior Associate Dean of University Libraries, graciously hosted on behalf of the East Asia Library, as EAL director Zhijia Shen, was unavoidably absent. The Venerable Lama Tenzin Dhonden was accompanied by Matthew and Katie, two volunteers with Seeds of Compassion, the organization that Lama Tenzin co-founded and which arranged for the recent visit to Seattle by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Those present from the University included:
After introductions, Professor Michael Shapiro gave a brief overview of the history of the University's former Tibetan language program. The Tibetan collection at the East Asia Library is a legacy of that program. The collection contains over 4,000 titles, totaling approximately 9,000 volumes. Print and microform holdings include approximately 5,000 titles. These holdings make it one of the nation's larger collections of Tibetan materials.
The bulk of the collection was acquired in one of two ways: 1) As many as several hundred texts were acquired when the Jackson School's Far East Institute purchased the Joseph Rock library, in 1954. This was two years after the University began its Tibetan language program. Some of the older and perhaps rarer texts originally came from the Rock collection. 2) Most of the other texts in our collection were acquired through the South Asian P.L. 480 Library Program. Initiated during the mid-1950s, and carried out under the direction of the Library of Congress, P.L. 480 was an exchange program whereby the US government swapped food aid for books and other cultural resources. (AM)
Currently on exhibit at the East Asia Library is a display on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. The East Asia Library received a Friends of the Libraries Grant in 2005 to purchase materials on the Japanese tea ceremony. Books shown in the display were a part of this gift. There will be a lecture and demonstration of the Tea Ceremony by Former Grand Master of Tea Ceremony, Sen Genshitsu, in May. (KYC)
During the spring quarter, Hyokyoung Yi, Korean Studies Librarian, will offer four identical information sessions on how to use WorldCat Local, the pilot library catalog for UW Libraries' holdings and beyond. This course is primarily offered to students in Korean Studies but anyone is welcome to join the Friday afternoon classes. The class dates are:
The classes will be held in the Allen Auditorium in the Allen Library from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. This course will enhance the experience of students in searching for and retrieving research materials especially for East Asian language items. (HY)
The Chinese collection has acquired Gudian wen xian yanjiu jikan. The first five of the series of Chinese classic literature, Gudian wen xian yanjiu jikan, 1-5 (古典文獻研究輯刊，初編至五編) has been added to the EAL collection. This set has been published by Taiwan's Hua Mulan Press since 2005. The series collects important dissertations and master's theses written by Taiwanese scholars during the past decades in the area of classical Chinese philology. The set has received many positive reviews from scholars both in Taiwan and Mainland China. This acquisition was generously funded by the Taiwan Collection Endowment at the East Asia Library. One purpose of this endowment is to provide funding for acquisitions of library materials published in Taiwan or about Taiwan. (MM)
The University of Washington Libraries, through its East Asia Library, has received a special grant from the Henry Luce Foundation in the amount of $25,000 to support the Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librarianship in the Electronic Environment, which will be hosted by the University of Washington Libraries on the UW campus July 19 through August 1, 2008. The summer institute will provide timely professional training for Chinese studies librarians focusing on librarianship in the electronic environment. Thirty-eight librarians from academic libraries across North America have been selected to participate. The Henry Luce grant puts the institute in a solid financial position and gives it the edge to make the program excellent. (ZS)
The East Asia Library received a gift of $25,000 from a private donor to establish the Minglai Library Book Fund for Chinese Medicine to support the growing interest in interdisciplinary research related to alternative medicines and humanities. The East Asia Library will solicit recommendations from specialists at the Institute of Chinese Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to help build this collection. (ZS)
An award of $5,000 from the Allen Fund was received to purchase the 98-volume set of reprints of historical and political records during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1937-1945). The Korean and Japanese collections jointly provided funding to cover the remainder of the cost to acquire these valuable research materials. The purchase also provides access to the electronic version of the materials. While archive materials of the colonial era are relatively scarce, this collection is the first publication of this kind to meet the demand for primary sources on the late Japanese colonial policies in Korea.
The set includes a rich collection of secretly kept internal documents from various institutions, such as the Japanese imperial parliament, the Japanese colonial government general, the police department, the Japanese military department, and many other influential organizations in colonized Korea. The period spans the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War through the end of World War II. Through these sources, scholars can research the Japanese colonial government's policies on ideological conversion, colonial assimilation, law enforcement, public order, political prisoners, and industrial economics. The set includes statistical data, information on the military and conscription system, and various other kinds of policy-related information from the period. (HY)
As one of the recipient libraries for this program in the United States, the EAL received its annual gift of 312 titles (about 384 volumes) in March 2008 from the Window to China program through the National Library of China. These books fall within the humanities and social sciences subject areas. (MM)
Beijing Rare Book Co. (北京珍本书店) has given the EAL a gift of 21 titles (24 volumes) in March 2008. The books are in the subject areas of art history, classic literature, philosophy, and ancient history, including the 3-volume set of Longmen shiku wenshi tapian ji (龙门石窟纹饰拓片集). The gift was arranged by Michael Meng and he hopes more such gifts will come from Zhenben in the future. (MM)
Anne Moreau and Michael Meng
The EAL staff joined Anne and Michael in celebrating their first anniversary at the East Asia Library. Michael Meng, Chinese Studies Librarian, started his position at the EAL on May 1, 2007; Anne Moreau, Administrative Assistant, started her position on May 7, 2007. It has been wonderful to have them on board. We look forward to celebrating many more anniversaries for them in the future. (ZS)
Six librarians from the East Asia Library attended the annual conference of the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Atlanta, April 1-6, 2008. It was the first time Heija Ryoo, Korean cataloger, and Junghae Lee, James Palais Collection Cataloger, attended the CEAL/AAS conference. Michael Meng, Chinese Studies Librarian, is a member of the CEAL Committee on Technical Processing, which organized the committee's public meeting. Hyokoung Yi, Korean Studies Librarian, was there a day early to teach a session at the two-day pre-conference, "2008 Workshop on Korean Studies Librarianship." She also gave a presentation at the OCLC CJK Users Group meeting about WorldCat Local on behalf of the East Asia Library at the University of Washington. Over 180 people attended the meeting. Hyokyoung is an elected member on the Board of the OCLC CJK Users Group representing the Korean studies area. Keiko Yokota-Carter, Japanese Studies Librarian, in addition to CEAL/AAS, attended the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC). Keiko chaired the meeting of the Committee on Japanese Materials, which focused on the topic "Japanese Collections in the Age of Web 2.0." She was appointed Chair of the Digital Resource Committee of the NCC and will work to improve conditions for subscribing to Japanese commercial electronic resources by academic institutions in North America. Both Keiko Yokota-Carter and Zhijia Shen attended the CEAL Executive Committee meeting as the out-going chairs of the Committee on Japanese Materials and of the Committee on Chinese Materials of CEAL, respectively. Zhijia Shen chaired the public meetings of the Committee on Chinese Materials, which offered a panel entitled "Physical Space vs. Cyberspace: Stories, Issues, and Vision of Chinese Collections," and the Forum on Chinese e-Resources. It was a great conference. The librarians from our East Asia Library made active contributions and effectively represented the UW Libraries. (ZS)
Japanese Studies Librarian Keiko Yokota-Carter took the opportunity to visit noteworthy Japanese collections in Paris on her recent trip to France in April. She visited four Japan studies collections:
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