East Asian Librarianship
This page has been designed to provide a bird's-eye view of what is special about East Asian librarianship, in part through description of several research initiatives that I plan to undertake in connection with my own MLS degree studies, and in part through a selection of URL links to certain electronic resources and CKJ OPACs that I find it useful or instructive to consult. I see this page as a tool-box vehicle, where I can begin to collect in one place the specialized resources and projects that define the discipline for me. My long-term plan is to continue developing the page post-launch as a pilot resource that may eventually contribute unique information to the field. Because the community of East Asian librarians is already quite active in providing special information to its users, the question of what precise focus should be adopted by yet another EALIS Web page is still open-ended.
The snapshot here reflects a quotidian theme, but one that can serve to represent the practice of East Asian librarianship through its juxtaposition of subjects: a Japanese novel rests beside a bouquet of wildflowers gathered last summer at Walden Pond. The East Asian library enterprise today involves more than collecting and preserving the published and archival record of Chinese, Japanese and Korean civilizations. Rather, it must also document, provide access to and facilitate the multi-directional communication of worldwide cultural transmission that has become the reality of postmodern times. Recently at MIT I have begun to provide language input to cataloging of maps published by the Geological Survey of Japan. This work has helped to refresh my skills in Japanese, and for further practice I have begun to read from parallel literary texts (works already translated from Japanese to English) to explore the world of Japanese fiction that I have not touched since early graduate school at Berkeley. The book shown on my kitchen table above is the landmark novella by the early 2oth-century modernist Natsume S¯oseki, I Am A Cat. With this photo as my point of departure, I've also begun to explore, just for fun, the WorldCat database for model Japanese bibliographic records, and also to look at vernacular Japanese records available in some of my favorite CJK OPACs.
EALIS Research Initiatives, 2001-2002
(I) Survey of split collections in selected libraries worldwide which have resulted from traditions of local classification in cataloging Chinese (or other CJK) materials, as opposed to convergence with LC/Dewey; an example may be seen in the arrangement of options for call number searching available in the Innovative OPAC (Dragon) of the University of Hong Kong Libraries
(II) Comparison of selected cataloging records with Chinese bibliographic data, drawn from the Web OPAC/s of a library or libraries using local classification, with corresponding DLC records, to establish correspondences across schemes and study the feasibility of developing a crosswalk and bilingual thesaurus for selected classes; among the libraries eligible to contribute records for this study is the Harvard Law School Library, where the Moody classification system is currently applied in cataloging Chinese legal materials
(III) Pilot launch of two Web pages to experiment with multilingual, extended character-set (International Phonetic Alphabet; Hong Kong local characters) and cross-script (CJK/roman) Web documentation for two types of linguistic data: text and glossaries from the Yunnan Bai language; and alternate views of a Chinese text comprising standard Chinese and Cantonese versions
Further description and context for the above research initiatives is available at projects.
Selected EALIS Resources
- AskEASL (Ask an East Asian Studies Librarian Virtual Help Desk)
- UMass Asian Studies Librarian Sharon Domier's page provides downloadable guides to Japanese databases and computer literacy, Japanese library OPACs, & Japanese materials selection
- At http://www.library.umass.edu/subject/easian/askeasl/askEASLguides.html
- Chinese character dictionaries on the Web
- Commercial site provides links to numerous online character dictionaries, including one for Unicode addresses
- At http://zhongwen.com/zi.htm
- Eastlib Web Interface
- Listserv of the Council on East Asian Libraries of the Association of Asian Studies
- At http://staff.washington.edu/rrbritt/ceal/Eastlibinstructions.htm
- Harvard China Historical GIS Project
- Under construction; searching the geographic database for Chinese place names sometimes works but the project goal is to associate GIS mapping facilities with Chinese historical datasets (Chinese data are Guobiao encoded); according to Lex Berman, searching the geographic database for associated Chinese gazetteers held by Harvard-Yenching is already available in 2001 -- I haven't tried it yet
- At http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/
- Harvard-Yenching Guide to Chinese Studies Electronic Resources
- Provides links to Chinese electronic newspapers, some Chinese databases that can be accessed by users directly through online registration (e.g. Academia Sinica), and some resources only available to Harvard affiliates
- At http://hcl.harvard.edu/harvard-yenching/chinadatabase.html
- KoreaWeb
- A Korean studies portal maintained by Frank Hoffman (with the cutest Web gadget I've ever seen)
- At http://koreaweb.ws/
- OCLC Newsletter, July/August 2001
- See pp.18-20 for an article about resolution of different Chinese encoding standards for contributed records, and a Chinese/English vernacular-script name authority database project, both at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
- At http://www.oclc.org/news/newsletter/
- RLG East Asian Studies Community
- Includes general information on RLG services to member East Asian libraries, links to essential documents on Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversion, and links to selected articles from RLG Focus
- At http://www.rlg.org/eas/
CJK Web OPACs
- CUHK Libraries Home Page
- At http://www.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/
- HKU Libraries Home Page
- At http://www.hku.hk/lib/
- Iowa/Aleph CJK database
- At http://river.lib.uiowa.edu:4505/ALEPH/-/start/iot05
- Queens Public Library Home Page
- At http://web2.queenslibrary.org/
- HKUST Library Home Page
- At http://library.ust.hk/
- Tsinghua University Library Home Page
- At http://www.lib.tsinghua.edu.cn/english/
- UW School of Law: East Asian Law Dept
- At http://lib.law.washington.edu/eald/eald.html
