Committee on Public Services
|| Committee Members (1999-2002) ||
|| Annual Meeting Agenda, 2002 ||
|| Annual Meeting Paper Excerpts, 2000 ||
|| Annual Meeting Papers, Chicago, 2001 ||
|| East Asian Studies Bibliographical Instruction Clearinghouse ||
|| EASyHelp: East Asian Scholars
Help Desk ||
|| Ask Asia by Asia Society ||
Committee Members (1999-2002)
Chair:
Cathy Chiu
East Asian Library
Davidson Library
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
U.S.A.
voice: 805-893-2365
FAX: 805-893-4676
e-mail: chiu@library.ucsb.edu
Tokiko
Y. Bazzell
Japan Specialist Librarian
Asia Collection Dept
University of Hawaii at Manoa
2550 The Mall
Honolulu, Hawaii, 96822 U.S.A.
voice: 808-956-2315
FAX: 808-956-5968
e-mail:tokiko@hawaii.edu
Sharon
Domier
East Asian Collection
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
154 Hicks Way
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003
U.S.A.
voice: 413-545-2728
e-mail: sdomier@library.umass.edu
Robert Felsing
East Asian Collection
Knight Library
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1299
U.S.A.
voice: 541-346-1875
FAX: 541-346-3485
e-mail: felsing@oregon.uoregon.edu
Calvin Hsu
East Asian Collection
130 Wall St./P.O. Box 208240
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
U.S.A.
voice: 203-432-1794
FAX: 203-432-8527
e-mail: calvin.hsu@yale.edu
Sun-Yoon Lee
East Asian Library
University of Southern California
University Park
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0182
U.S.A.
voice: 213-821-1567
FAX: 213-740-7437
e-mail: sunyoonl@usc.edu
Guoqing Li
East Asian Studies Reading Room
320N Main Library
1858 Neil Avenue Mall
Columbus, OH 43210
U.S.A.
voice: 614-292-9597
FAX: 614-292-7859
e-mail: li.272@osu.edu
Ex Officio: Bill McCloy
Gallagher Law Library
East Asian Law Department
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98105
U.S.A.
voice: 206 543-7447
FAX: 206 685-2165
e-mail: wbmccloy@u.washington.edu
CEAL
Committee on Public Services
Annual Meeting
1:40pm-3:30pm, April 4, 2002
Exhibit
Hall B North #1
(lower level)
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.
1:40-1:50 Chair's Report (Cathy Chiu, University of California at Santa Barbara)
1:50-2:00 Online East Asian Reference Desk (AskEASL): One Year Later (Sharon Domier, University of Massachusetts)
2:00-2:30 Unearthing Scholarly Treasures and Trivia: A Bibliographer's Perspective on Creating Bibliographies of Western Writings on East Asia (Frank Schulman)
2:30-2:40 Interlibrary Loan with Japanese Libraries (Mary Jackson, ARL)
2:40-3:00 Geographic Resources Related to East Asia in Modern Library
Environments (Thomas Hahn, Cornell University)
3:00-3:15 Information Literacy Task Force Report (Ellen Hammond)
3:15-3:30 Q/A
Annual Meeting Paper Excerpts, 2000
CEAL
Committee on Public Services
Annual Meeting
7:10pm-9:00pm,
March 8, 2000
Town and Country Resort Hotel
Japanese Studies for the 21st Century: the Public Services Perspective (Yasuko Makino, Princeton)
There was a great increase in the size, scale and scope of Japanese studies
in the past decade. Japanese studies have become more and more interdisciplinary
and the specialization broadened. The users of Japanese collections have increased and diversified.
When it becomes clear that the larger institutions alone cannot service all the needs, smaller institutions will have to get together and hire Japanese librarians under consortial arrangement to serve clientele in different institutions.
The new information technology has given all of us unprecedented equal chance to be world-class libraries. With the technology available to all, the hierarchies between various sizes and types of libraries have broken down, and this will continue to be more so in the 21st century.
Still, there are many challenges facing Japanese studies collections of the future: dramatic increase in volume and variety of formats; high costs of acquiring needed information; the difficulty of maintaining acquisition levels given financial restrictions; and responding to broadened user demands.
Public Services librarians have to function as good consultants and judges. To do this effectively, we have to be trained in subjects as well as information retrieval to navigate through the broad electronic information landscape. We need to renew our commitment to resource sharing, not only library materials, reference services, facilities and human resources as well consortial use/subscription to ever-increasing expensive online databases, electronic journals, and periodical indexes, etc.
We must train ourselves to have the insight to foresee the direction the field is heading and to prepare for it. We must find ways to accomplish this goal through cooperation both national and international by working as a team. Committed librarians with clear visions of their goals and a thorough understanding of the needs of the Japanese library field can create a good and desirable future. The future of Japanese studies collections depends on how effectively we cooperate and use limited resources, both materials and human, to the maximum with the help of advancing technology.
Serve the People: Contemporary Chinese Studies for the 21st Century (Annie Chang, UC Berkeley)
Established in late 1950s, Center for Chinese Studies Library currently has 80,000 titles of contemporary Chinese studies materials in social sciences. In recent years, CCSL has focused on collecting important officially-sponsored publications such as Wenshiziliao (Historical and Literary Materials), Xindifangzhi (New Local Gazetteers), and Zhongguo gongchandang zuzhishi ziliao (Chinese Communist Party Organizational Histories).
Libraries need to build up specialized collections within the framework of cooperative collection development and acquisition policies, and a commitment to "hands-on" public service. Some suggestions are offered for cooperation:
- Develop cooperative acquisition and resource sharing policies;
- Join professional societies;
- Keep each other informed of cooperative policies, special collections and new acquisitions;
- Find more ways to share information about each other's collections with campus communities;
- Give outside researchers direct access to materials.
Automated tools cannot replace human contact. Public service, namely "serve the people", is always the first priority in CCSL.
Bridge to the Community: USC Korean Heritage Library Experience (Ken Klein, Joy Kim, U. of Southern Calif.)
Friends of the Korean Heritage Library played an integral role in establishing the Korean Heritage Library at USC. The founding board of directors consisted of 20 members, all first generation immigrants, mostly professionals or businessmen. In order for the group to have a wider community appeal, the Bylaws required that the top leadership consist of two co-chairs: a USC alumnus and a non-alumnus.
Because of the cultural nature of the library and the role they played in the origin of it, the Korean Friends considered it their own, so they were highly motivated to support it. The Friends energetically organized fundraising events and through them generated about 100 newspaper articles and TV reports, raising the Korean Heritage Library's profile in the Korean community as well as within the University.
The most significant contribution from the Friends was by accident. One alumnus touched by their enthusiasm and impressed by the fact that such a library and such a support group existed at USC mobilized influential alumni in Korea and formed a parallel support organization. To date, that foundation has given more than all other donors put together.
Cultivating such a support group requires a lot of work, not by one person, but by a team of several people, each with different roles to play. Some members of the group will seek rewards, which enhance their prestige, for their work. Association with high level University officials is a symbol of their social status. It is essential that a high profile official be directly involved. They also need someone whom they can approach comfortably, someone within the University who would serve as their first contact point and as a communication channel between the Friends and the University.
Most fundraising events require an enormous amount of logistical and clerical work: writing, printing, mailing, making reservations, arranging caterers, press relations, and ordering the plaques. The support from development office is very important.
To start a support group for the first time, you have to set clear boundaries as to the division of the work between the friends, development staff, and yourself early on. It is important to let them understand what kind of support they can and cannot expect from the University and you.
Having a large sum of endowments to supply generous acquisitions funds year after year made all the hard work worthwhile.
East Asian Law Research at the University of Washington: Web pages for China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea (Rob Britt, UW)
Rob Britt, Japanese Specialist in the Marian Gould Gallagher Law Library, has been in his current position for 13 years responsible for reference, collection development, and cataloging. He introduced the Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean legal research guides produced by him and Bill McCloy.
Annual Meeting
Papers, 2001
CEAL
Committee on Public Services
Annual Meeting
10:40am-12:30pm, March 22, 2001
Sheraton Chicago Hotel
Chicago, IL
Web Technology in
East Asian Libraries: Its Innovation and Sustainability
The end of
cataloging the World Wide Web?
On the future of
database driven Internet Research Guides
by Hanno Lecher, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Against the background of the ever growing capabilities of search engines such as Google and the like, especially in terms of exhaustiveness, high quality results and content information, manually maintained link collections and virtual libraries seem to become more and more obsolete.
I believe, however, that there is still need for professionally maintained Web guides, as long as they turn their focus into a new direction: they have to develop into veritable research guides, including additional information services such as introductions on how to use the Web for research purposes in a given field, as well as state of the art reports, guest commentaries, mailing lists etc.
From the outset it has been the aim of the Internet Guide for Chinese Studies to serve exactly in this function. So far, I have to admit, I have failed to accomplish this goal. In my presentation I will explore the reasons of this failure, and what is been done currently to move into this direction more decicively.
Taking the newly designed IGCS section on News Media as example, I will show how the new concept of the IGCS will address the needs of Internet based research by using more flexible technology and by providing additional services that common search engines will never be able to handle:
1. The core of the guide will be a dynamic (probably XML) database of records on important resources available on the Web. These records will have a common format (similar to bibliographic records with fields for author, title, publisher, keywords, etc.) and include tags that allow structured output. Also, the user should be able to decide whether to see the verbose form of records containing all information available, or only minimal information showing title, editor, and URL.
2. Around the database there will be portal sites for each section that are maintained by specialists in the corresponding field. On the one hand these portal sites provide access to the records in the database (through a search mechanism as well as via some sort of table of contents), on the other hand they will also contain additional information and services such as:
a. a mailing list
b. an introduction to using the available Web resources
c. state-of-the-art reports on recent developments in the field
d. guest commentaries from other professionals in the field
e. some sort of news reports (new finds in archaeology etc.)
f. and more...
Dedicated portal sites will be better able to address the information needs of scholars and students alike, and they might easily establish themselves as eminent Web resources in their respective fields. At the same time, maintaining the records on Web resources as an XML database will reduce maintainance trouble, allow for better results handling, and improves the possibilities of cooperation within a team of experts acting as editors of often overlapping sections.
Manually maintained link collections might be doomed to become obsolete, but the need for high quality Internet research guides has to be addressed, and I think I have shown a way to do this in a very meaningful way.
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Maureen
Donovan
CEAL
Public Services
March
22, 2001
Those
were the Days!
A
Short History of the East Asian Libraries Cooperative World Wide Web
This
presentation is an update of the East Asian Libraries Cooperative World Wide
Web. Some in the audience may remember
the first presentation that I gave at CEAL about this project, in March 1994
under the title, "Possible Uses of the World Wide Web in East Asian
Collections." A lot has happened
since then!
The
origin of the project can be traced back a bit further, to the Third Regional
Conference of Asia Libraries in the Midwest, held in Ann Arbor in June 1989 at
which participants identified a need to transmit such information as tables of
contents to each other and to researchers.
Already fax technology was available and we collectively imagined a kind
of fax that could be transmitted simultaneously to several recipients. When the action agenda was drawn up, I was
given the task of investigating emerging technologies to determine how to do
this.
Upon
returning to Ohio State, I began learning everything I could about image
processing and transmission technology.
Through an email list I met a librarian at Australian National
University, Tony Barry, who had similar interests. Based on his advice, I
realized the need for a computer with enough memory to store scanned images and
function as an ftp server. The OSU Systems
Librarian, Anna Wang, and I wrote a grant proposal for an OSU seed grant to
acquire such a machine, the Macintosh Quadra 950, and a scanner. The grant was successful and we began
experimenting in Fall 1991.
Initially
the tools and techniques were quite primitive.
In the summer of 1993 Tony Barry forwarded an email from Marc Andreesen
announcing the Beta version of Mosaic, the predecessor of Netscape. The minute I tested it, I knew -- as
everyone else would a few months later -- that this was a solution to the needs
identified at the 1989 Ann Arbor meeting that exceeded our wildest hopes. I presented a paper that addressed the
changes implicit in the evolving technology for librarians at East Asian
collections at the ICANAS in Hong Kong that summer, entitled: "Human
Resources for Asian Collections in a Networked World: The Time is Now."
At
Ohio State we prepared grant applications to the U.S. Department of Education
Title II-A and to the Japan-US Friendship Commission for projects entitled,
"Project for East Asian Resource Sharing (PEARS)" and "Project
for Japanese Resource Sharing," respectively. Before we knew it we were working with colleagues at nine other
institutions to realize the promise of this emerging technology. The institutions that were included in these
grants were: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin (PEARS grant) and
Berkeley, Columbia, Duke and MIT (PJRS grant).
Once
we got these multi-institutional grants, project management immediately became
a challenge. The funds we received were
allocated for equipment and student hours.
There was not enough money to hire a project manager or other dedicated
personnel or to hold meetings to facilitate coordination of effort. I still had my main job, which was expanding
in scope, with income from a sizable endowment to spend.
Nonetheless, web
sites went up at all of the participating institutions. I reported on these projects in detail at
the Beijing IFLA in 1996 in a paper: "East Asian Libraries Cooperative
World Wide Web: An experiment in collaboration to build interdependence." [i][1]
The East Asian Libraries Cooperative WWW was ranked one of the most
widely linked sites in 1997.[ii][2]
It continues to get a lot of traffic.
Ohio
State acquired a very large UNIX computer (Sun SPARCcenter 2000) for a cost of
about $90,000 from the Title II-A funds.
After the grant-funded period was over, I felt strongly that the
availability of this computer should continue to be exploited for cooperative
projects supporting research on East Asia using World Wide Web technology.
Working with
engineering graduate students, whom I was able to hire in a graduate research
assistant position, I concentrated on database development. The first database was that we put up on the
web was the Japanese Company Histories database, with data converted from a
Pro-Cite bibliography into a number of flat file lists on the web site. Later we put the data into an interactive,
searchable file. This database also
includes links to scanned images of tables of contents of a number of these
books.
Furthermore,
we set up a secure system that would allow contributions from remote project
participants. In particular, I began
working with scholars. One example is
the National Taiwan University Center for Buddhist Studies, for whom I provide
a mirror site to improve North American access to their extensive
databases. Another example is Kinema
Club, a project initiated by Japanese cinema scholars to share information
about research resources. Their web
site, including a database of Japanese cinema studies, went up in 1995 and was
followed later by the Kinejapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu,
a scholarly mailing list on Japanese cinema studies with about 400 subscribers
worldwide. I serve as the main
"owner" of that list at Ohio State, but Aaron Gerow (Yokohama
National U) and Markus Nornes (U Michigan) bear most of the responsibility for the list and its
operations, both technical and intellectual.
I
also explored cooperation with organizations, especially the Association for
Asian Studies. During a three-year
period (1995-97) I ran a cooperative electronic resources booth in the AAS
Exhibits Hall, with a goal of supporting scholars and librarians involved in
creating electronic resources. In 1996
I organized a well-attended workshop held in conjunction with the Honolulu AAS
meeting. A prototype for a database of
annotated entries for web resources in Asian studies was set up after a
discussion at AAS -- this was the precursor of the Digital Asia Library project
currently underway at U of Wisconsin. I
also started the Asiandoc electronic newsletter where developers of electronic
resources for Asian studies could share information about their projects. While all of these efforts were successful
to some extent, gradually efforts like these came to seem less necessary.
I
also have worked closely with the North American Coordinating Council on
Japanese Library Resources. In 1997 I
volunteered to look into setting up a union list of Japanese serials to support
the ARL Global Resources Program's Japan Project. There was no model to follow for how to do this, so I worked with
my graduate research assistant to develop software designed to fulfill the
dreams of the 1989 meeting mentioned earlier.
By a series of lucky coincidences, I met an executive from the Honda
Corporation who took an interest in my research -- he refers to my office as a
"lab" -- and provided a donation from Honda to support programming
for the union list during 1998-99.
The union list
software, which consisted of a large number of inter-related cgi scripts proved
to be unstable. Ultimately data was
corrupted as a result of software problems.
When we could not fix it and efforts to find more funding proved futile,
my supervisor convinced me to shift my focus away from web projects and toward
collection management. By this time the grant-funded computer was aging, so
Ohio State purchased a replacement, with the understanding that it might be
used in part for other purposes as well (as it now is). My new supervisor continues the same
advice, with added pressure to do a more traditional kind of research, leading
to publication in peer-reviewed sources.
Following the NCC
San Diego meeting, a meeting was held at ARL in July 2000 to discuss the future
of the union list. At that meeting Ohio
State agreed to stabilize the data, finish inputting data we had on hand along
with information in the 1992 printed union list, complete this work by October
1, 2000, and maintain the database on our server until a new home could be
found. We have followed through on
those commitments.
With
all that experience running a web site, what am I doing now? Well, I am increasingly focusing on
integrating my work into larger library systems. For example, rather than establishing a separate database of Ohio
State's manga collection we have added collection information and specific
genre terms (shojo manga, yakuza manga, etc) to records so that
they can be retrieved directly from the OPAC.
I am thinking of doing the same for the Japanese company histories
collection, so that I will not need to continue maintaining the separate
database that exists now. As part of U
Wisconsin's Digital Asia Library, I am cataloging Japanese web resources in
CORC. These records will be integrated
into Ohio State's OPAC as well. At the
ARL meeting last July, the clear preference was for incorporating retrospective
records and holdings information in the national bibliographic utilities,
although everyone appreciated the need for a union list in the short term. Overall, the direction is toward integration
of subject collections in mainstream library systems, thereby facilitating
access, document delivery, and reference services. The East Asian Libraries WWW is still up and running. I still think of it as the electronic shelf
of my collection, but its future direction is unclear.
Before
concluding, I want to mention some books that have influenced me and helped me
to understand more about the context in which we work. While some specific information in these
works might be out of date, I still find them useful and recommend them highly:
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on
software engineering (Addison-Wesley, 1975)
Carl Malamud. Exploring the Internet: a technical
travelogue (Prentice Hall, 1993)
Nicholas Negroponte. Being Digital (Knopf, 1995)
Clayton M. Christensen. The Innovator's Dilemma (Harvard
Business School Press, 1997)
Larry Downes and Chunka Mui. Unleashing
the Killer App: Digital strategies for market dominance (Harvard Business
School Press, 1998)
John Seely Brown and Paul
Duguid. The Social Life of
Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)
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Please send comments and suggestions to Cathy Chiu. Page revised: 05/16/2001.