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Recent Developments at the Stanford East Asia Library

Assunta PisaniAssociate University Librarian

Dongfang ShaoCurator & Head Librarian, East Asia Library

Stanford University

PRDLA Meeting October 31, 2005

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Hoover-SUL Realignment

• In September 2001 the Stanford University Libraries assumed responsibility for the management of the Hoover East Asia Collection.

• The Collection was moved from the Lou Henry Hoover Building to the fourth floor of the Meyer Library.

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East Asian Collection, Lou Henry Hoover Building

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The Hoover EAL Collection Focus

• The original focus of the East Asia

Collection was primarily politics and modern history since the late Qing dynasty, assembled by the famous Sinologist Dr. Mary Wright in the 1940s.

• Subsequently, Hoover EAC’s collecting policy emphasized the acquisition of materials to support research on 20th century history, political and social movements, and economics.

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Meyer Library

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• From the narrowly-focused program of the Hoover Institution, to the much broader and more comprehensive program at Stanford University

• Cover nearly every discipline and historical period : ranging from early Chinese armor to nuclear disarmament policy, from Taiwanese kinship systems to modern Japanese literary thought, from samurai legal codes to post-Maoist economics, and from ancient Chinese art to Japanese business

• New Korean collection• LMB increased by 68% from 2001

Expanded Coverage of EAL

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Reading Room for Serials

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EAL Circulation Desk

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Retrospective Conversion Project

• Over 58% of Stanford’s collections in Chinese and Japanese are described only in the card catalog located in the East Asia Library Reading Room.

• 150,000 pre-1984 Chinese language titles and 70,000 pre-1984 Japanese language titles are not in machine readable (MARC) form .

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Online catalog computer in the mezzanine

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• A three-year grant of $800,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to convert a large fraction of the East Asia Library catalog to machine readable (MARC) form.

• Many of EAL early materials are unique or very rare, and converting EAL holdings so that they appear in the OPAC and the bibliographic utilities will be a significant service to the Stanford community and to the scholarly community worldwide.

• Conversion services by Backstage Library Works in Orem, Utah 84097

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Recon time frame

• Began November 2003• Expect completion by end of 2005 or early

2006• Production is comprised of all phases of

the conversion of the collection, including keying and brief record enhancement, machine and manual searching, and quality review.

• Expect to load first batch of records later this fall. In the meanwhile, EAL staff have been checking the records in RLIN to ensure quality and accuracy.

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Recon Sequence

• Collection Titles • Chinese Communist Party 14,500 • Japanese communism, etc. 16,000 • Japanese labor movements 8,000 • Chinese labor movements 12,000 • Chinese student movements 6,000 • Japanese colonies 12,000 • Japanese biography 4,000 • Chinese govt. gazetteers 13,000 • Japanese microfilm 1,000 • Chinese microfilm titles 5,500 • Postwar Japan 9,000 • Other Chinese history 40,000

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Archives & Rare Books Digitization Project

• SUL has acquired a Swiss-designed robot, the Digitizing Line, which dramatically increases the speed of digitizing bound volumes (approx. ten times the rate of manual scanning).

• The project aims to identify all significant Chinese/Japanese archives & rare books at the EAL, and to digitize the valuable trove of Chinese archives & rare books, so as to enable scholars to get easier access to and work effectively with these resources.

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Chinese Rare books at the EAL

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• Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C. C. Huang’s unique, invaluable collection of Chinese archives acquired by SUL. Consists of legal and administrative documents reproduced from Chinese archives, and is the largest and best collection of Chinese legal materials outside China.

• This collection is unique not only in size, but also in temporal, geographic, and topical scope. It includes some 2500 legal cases (and other records) from the Qing, Republican, and PRC eras, dating from the mid-eighteenth century down through the nineteen-eighties.

Chinese Legal Archives

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Contemporary archives from Shunyi County, Beijing

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• There is a significant number of records related to questions

of political campains, social structures, household registration, village governance, etc.

• Digitized materials make Stanford University a magnet for scholars from around the world. In the East Asia Library, the material would be concentrated in one place, while the originals are scattered in archives all over China; access to those Chinese archives is unpredictable, and usually requires protracted negotiations and submission to onerous conditions (not to mention significant financial expense)

Continuing Efforts to Collect Contemporary Archives

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PRC archives of targets for Dictatorship

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The PRC Cadres’ archives

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New emphasis on digital collections

• Assist the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica to develop Scripta Sinica, the largest database of traditional Chinese sources, and installing in Stanford server

• This enormous corpus of materials including the texts of a wide range of traditional Chinese works, totaling 224,554,148 graphs. Access to 598 titles will be available to those affiliated with Stanford. The quid pro quo is not necessarily a financial arrangement but is some form of exchange.

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中 央 研 究 院

漢 籍 電 子 文 獻 (Scripta Sinica)

資 料 庫 名 稱 製 作 單 位 字 數 備 註

二十五史

史語所

漢籍全文資料庫計畫

39,966,334

十三經 8,600,316

小說戲曲暨其他 3,375,420 說明

漢籍全文資料庫 251,754,523 付費使用清實錄 42,514,211 付費使用

古漢語文獻語料庫語言所文獻語料庫研究室資訊所詞庫小組及史語所漢籍全文資料庫計畫

13,489,184 付費使用

選擇資料庫並 　　　　　瀚典全文檢索系統 2.0 版瀚典全文檢索系統 1.3 版

1997 年 11 月 開啟

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Korean collection• One area where Stanford University is

expanding its horizon for East Asian studies is Korean studies, both the language studies and the social sciences. In order to meet the needs of new faculty and students in Korean studies, the Korean collection was set up this year, and a Korean studies librarian has been hired to do collection development and cataloging of Korean materials, in order to create a collection to support teaching and research at Stanford. We are in the process of fundraising to endow book funds for current and retrospective materials, and to hire a cataloger.

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Reading area in the mezzanine

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Acquisitions of East Asian Materials:

Monograph Additions (vols.)

Year Chinese Japanese Total Increment

2004- 2005

11,333 3,382 14,715 2,151

2003- 2004

8,727 3,837 12,564 3,923

2002- 2003

4,896 3,745 8,641 59

2001-2002

5,393 3,189 8,582 671

2000-2001

5,038 2,873 7,911 808

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Acquisitions of East Asian Materials:

Serials Additions (titles)

Year Chinese Japanese Total Increment

2004- 2005

1,352 236 1,588 483

2003- 2004

880 225 1,105 -70

2002- 2003

974 201 1,175 92

2001- 2002

885 198 1,083 67

2000- 2001

818 198 1,016 13

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Coordination & Cooperation

• Ongoing cooperation with the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, involving the purchase and provision of reference for archival and special collections on East Asia held by Hoover

• The selection and acquisition of East Asian art materials for the Art and Architecture Library, and plan to help Music Library to build an Asian music collection

• Some coordination between the Stanford EAL and CASS, Central Party Documents Center in certain areas: Contemporary China series, CCP official publications.

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Although various challenges still exit, the Stanford EAL is now on better footing thanks to diligent cost-efficiency methods and fundraising program. The Stanford EAL will continue to maximize all opportunities to cover all of the costs through effective management.

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End