2002

East Asian Academic Librarians of California

18th Annual Meeting, UCLA, September 27, 2002

Minutes

The 18th annual meeting of the East Asian Academic Librarians of California (EAALC) was called to order at 10:00 a.m. in the West Electronic Classroom of the Young Research Library, UCLA, by Amy Tsiang, convener.

Welcome

Alison Bunting, Interim University Librarian of UCLA, welcomed the attendants and delivered brief greeting words.

The meeting began with self-introduction from each participant around the table. The attendants were (in alphabetical order):

Claremont: Grace Chen; East View: Jeff Strandberg; UC Berkeley: Annie Chang, Evelyn Kuo, Sook-ja Park, Bruce Williams, Ai-lin Yang, Peter Zhou; UC Davis: Annie Lin;

UC Irvine: Hiroyuki Minamino, Lorelei Tanji, William Wong, Qing Yang, Abraham Yu;

UCLA: Tomoko Bialock, Hiro Good, Diana Jiang, Mikyung Kang, Toshie Marra, Richard Siao, Amy Tsiang, Huizhi Wang; UC Riverside: Kuei Chiu, Min Yu; UC San Diego: Shi Deng, Sanae Isozumi, Richard Wang; UC Santa Barbara: Cathy Chiu, Peter Pang; UC Santa Cruz: Yi-Yen Hayford; USC: Joy Kim, Ken Klein, Sun Yoon Lee, Lillian Yang

Member Library Reports

UC Berkeley (reported by Peter Zhou) -- Began with introduction of new members of Berkeley’s East Asian Library:

Evelyn Kuo, Head of Technical Service, Ai-lin Yang, Chinese Cataloging Librarian, Maria Church, Chinese Cataloging Assistant, Milly Shiu, Administrative Assistant, and Bruce Williams, Coordinator of Electronic Services/Western language selector. He also announced that Jae-Yong Chang of University of Toronto has accepted the offer for the position of Korean Studies Librarian. Berkeley has raised $34 million for the construction of a new East Asian Library building. A picture of design for the building was shown to the audience.

UC Davis (reported by Annie Lin) -- With growing student population at Davis, two more faculty in comparative literature and contemporary Chinese literature respectively were hired during the past academic year. Davis launched a new online system called Harvest in August, which featured CJK display capability. UC-Davis has hired a half time Chinese Material Specialist and is in the process to hire a half time Japanese Material Specialist.

UC Irvine (reported by William Wong) -- Introduced Lorelei Tanji, Chief Collection Officer and CDL Joint Steering Committee liaison, and announced that Abraham Yu was elected as the President-elect of the Council of East Asian Libraries (CEAL) last spring. Irvine needs to develop a new area in Japanese collection in relation with the arrival of a new faculty specializing in Japanese Buddhism. They received a funding from the Daesan Foundation in Seoul and some 600 volumes of current Korean publications. The East Asian Collection is expected to move back soon to the original place in the renovated building.

UC Riverside (reported by Kuei Chiu) -- The new Chancellor was hired in the past year and the new University Librarian would arrive in November. With growing student population, the materials budget is expected to increase. With the completion of retrospective conversion, all the CJK bibliographic records can be displayed in vernacular and are also searchable in vernacular.

UC Santa Barbara (reported by Cathy Chiu) -- A new online system was installed, and in this relation all CJK records would be reloaded to the local system soon. There was reorganization within the Library involving area studies, including Latin American studies, Slavic studies, and East Asian studies. UCSB added two centers: Center for Tibetan Studies and Center for Taiwan Studies. The Library has a renovation plan for the future.

UC Santa Cruz (reported by Yi-Yen Hayford) -- Received 10% budget increase in Chinese book budget, along with some friends' and donors funds in a total of seven grants. UCSC made special acquisitions of reference materials, Chinese art history, Taiwanese studies as well as Chinese DVDs and VCDs last year. CRUZCAT, UCSC's local WEBOPAC system could display and search in CJK vernaculars with supporting browser and keyboard input. Yi-Yen Hayford thanked Amy Tsiang, UCLA, and Annie Chang, UCB, for sharing the Chinese duplicates with them. The Library will acquire more Japanese materials in the future to support the faculty's new class in Japanese studies. UCSC also has a library expansion plan within the next ten years.

UC San Diego (reported by Richard Wang) -- Two additional faculty members in Chinese Studies and one in Korean Studies were hired. San Diego has a joint project with Stanford for collecting materials on Cultural Revolution in China. The Library has appointed Jim Cheng of University of Iowa to fill the position of the Director of International Relations and Pacific Studies Library from November 1, 2002.

USC (reported by Ken Klein) -- USC hired three faculty members in art history in the past years, and this year received a special funding from Freeman Foundation to acquire materials on visual art for East Asia. They have also hired an early Japanese historian recently, who will begin teaching from January 2003, and in this relation the Library will begin to develop Japanese collection more actively. The Library recently acquired a Japanese book collection from Prof. Jeffrey P. Mass who was a faculty at Stanford. The Korean Heritage Library received $1 million endowment for developing a collection of digital resources, and has been also granted to use electronic resources originated from the Korean National Assembly Library on site, in return USC will host an exchange librarian from the Korean National Assembly Library.

UCLA (reported by Amy Tsiang) -- The International Studies Overseas Program (ISOP) was rearranged and renamed as the UCLA International Institute to integrate area studies and thematic/global studies. UCLA Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures recently hired two additional faculty members in Indian Buddhism. At the East Asian Library, Sarah Elman left UCLA in August to relocate to Princeton, and Toshie Marra and Mikyung Kang serve as Interim Head of Cataloging Division and Public Services Division respectively. Pinyin conversion began in last May and post-conversion cleanup is still going on. Circulation hours were expanded by 11 hours per week, and began online circulation in January 2002. The Library purchased the 1,800 v. of supplement to Siku Quanshu with special supplementary allocation and outside funding, and also received a donation of over 1,800 volumes of Japanese books from the widow of late Prof. Marius B. Jansen last summer. The Library has received a special allocation of $60,000 per year for the next four years from the Freeman Foundation grant. UCLA Library has a remodel plan in the Young Research Library and the East Asian Library will be expanded by 5,000 SF. Online system is in process of search for a new vendor.

The colleagues from Stanford could not attend this year’s meeting. But, they asked Amy to pass the message that on September 18, the East Asia Library (a branch library) has opened the doors in their new location on the fourth floor of Meyer Library (two libraries away from the old site). The Library is named East Asia Library, Stanford University Libraries.

Bruce Williams asked about the library access policy between UCLA and USC, to which

Joy Kim explained that a charge of $150 to outside users was recently implemented for checking out materials from USC Library, while the use of materials on site should be still free of charge.

CAJ, CCND, and Other New Projects/Development

Jeff Strandberg of East View was a special guest to EAALC annual meeting this year. He gave a brief presentation about some of the East View’s products, especially on Chinese Academic Journals (CAJ), China Core Newspapers Database (CCND), and North Korean Print Subscriptions which is scheduled to be available in 2003. CAJ's social sciences and humanities series, which CDL subscribes, account for one third of the 6.3 million unique articles in CAJ. TTOD has begun adding pre-1994 articles to CAJ retrospectively, a laborious process that may take a year before it can be offered to CDL. CAJ currently provides full text articles from over 1,800 Chinese journals, and CCND provides access to 407 Chinese newspapers in full text. CAJ Bibliographic data was added as a separate option by popular request so that librarians could search metadata more effectively without the rigor of a full database search. East View can fulfill print subscriptions to thousands of periodicals from mainland China and 70 from North Korea, even meet cartographic needs for all countries in Asia (example: UCSB's Center for Analysis of Sacred Space, where East View provided digital topographic data for a project on Buddhist monasteries in China). Jeff Strandberg stressed that East View wants feedback from the group (contact: Jeff Strandberg <jeff.strandberg@eastview.com>).

Cathy Chiu asked if East View had any plan to cover Taiwan publications, to which Jeff Strandberg answered not at present.

White Paper on East Asian Digital Resources

EAALC provided input on a document called "Proposing a White Paper on East Asian Digital Resources Management and Development at the University of California" that was initially proposed by UCSD Libraries to the California Digital Library.

The group endorsed the proposal for a white paper and felt it would help to identify the appropriate infrastructure needed to acquire new online resources both in terms of budgetary funding and technology and to sustain those efforts.

They responded that they felt that such a planning document would assist in better utilizing our system-wide campus resources, and in meeting the increasing information needs of East Asian Studies on various campuses. They felt the results of this white paper would assist in identifying the resources available, the information needs of our users, and the future direction we want to go in providing support.

They pointed out that some additional benefits from the white paper are that it might increase the system's experience with delivery of multimedia (photographs, videos), handling of different standards, intellectual property rights, and censorship issues. The group felt that this white paper would be a model for other bibliographer/selector groups. And that this white paper and the expertise of the EAALC members would benefit the CDL and UC campuses as it engages in long-term planning. The group also understood that this would be a UC project, and for various reasons, could not be extensible to the entire EAALC membership.

In terms of any revisions to the proposal, the areas that could be fleshed out further are the team leadership, team membership, and the travel funding. Depending on who is involved, it might be possible to utilize existing travel support. In general, they thought that the estimates for salary and travel expenses were reasonable. In addition, the planning team membership should include some (or all) of the heads of UC campus East Asian collections to get system-wide perspectives and representation, in addition to CDL and UC campus collections representatives.

In terms of who are the people who are best equipped to be involved in this project--Karl Lo's name immediately came up. If Karl is not available, Peter Zhou would be the team leader. And Cathy Chiu expressed interest as a team member.

Consortium Acquisitions of New CJK E-Resources

Cathy Chiu led the discussion on consortium acquisitions of new CJK electronic resources. She first explained about the submission of CDL survey for electronic resources acquisitions from the group in late July 2002 and the reasons behind the priority order of 1) Yomiuri Shinbun, 2) CCND, and 3) Si Bu Cong Kan. After a great success with CAJ it is now hoped that some Japanese and Korean resources would be supported in Tier 1 category, whereas Si Bu Cong Kan, which is currently supported by five UC campuses, most probably would need to be resubmitted to Tier 2 category later. One concern with Si Bu Cong Kan is the price which is at present very high, and thus the group will have to negotiate for discount with the distributor.

After having catering lunch, tour to UCLA campus was provided to interested attendants.

Outsourcing of Japanese Cataloging: Berkeley Experience

Afternoon session began with a Power Point presentation by Evelyn Kuo on Berkeley’s experience with Kinokuniya Bookstore for outsourcing of Japanese cataloging service. She discussed: 1) why Berkeley needed outsourcing, 2) vendor selection criteria, 3) technical issues, 4) shelf-ready service guidelines, and 5) delivery of the service. Kinokuniya charges $33 per title for original cataloging excluding serials and $1 for searching matching record for copycataloging on OCLC. The service, so far, has met expectation for quality, but whether or not Berkeley keeps the contract with the vendor for the future is up to the position of Japanese cataloger. Questions should be referred to Daikichi Mitake (mitake@kinokuniya.com) of Kinokuniya Bookstore or Tomoko Haneda (thaneda@library.berkeley.edu).

CDL Shared Cataloging Program and CAJ Cataloging Project

Shi Deng delivered another Power Point presentation on CDL Shared Cataloging Program and CAJ cataloging project, and distributed a copy of the article entitled “One for nine: the Shared Cataloging Program of the California Digital Library” by Patricia Sheldahl French, et al. (Serials Review 28, Nov. 2002, pp. 4-12). The Shared Cataloging Program (SCP), which began in 1999, is responsible for cataloging, records distribution, and Persistent URLs (PIDs) maintenance for all electronic resources licensed by CDL. As a part of SCP, a group of staff at UCSD has recently begun cataloging ca. 1,800 CAJ titles under the leadership of Shi Deng. As a workflow, journals in international relations, economics, and political sciences are given first priority, reflecting the collection focus of UCSD. Any questions or comments regarding CAJ cataloging should be referred to Shi Deng (sdeng@ucsd.edu).

Pinyin Conversion Experience Sharing

The next session on Pinyin conversion was led by Amy Tsiang. Abraham Yu reported that Irvine sent 18,972 records to OCLC for conversion in November 2001. Among them 13,314 records were processed, 5,658 records were unprocessed, and 2,074 records were marked for review. All records were loaded back to the local system in April 2002. The conversion problems he and his staff identified were: 1) some records were only partially converted to Pinyin, and 2) some records were not converted at all. Most of the problem records were locally fixed by a part-time Chinese cataloger. The clean-up project was completed in the middle of September 2002. Abraham Yu also shared that a report on Irvine's experience with Pinyin conversion is available at the OCLC CJK Userg Group Web site.

Amy Tsiang reported on the experience at UCLA. While over 100,000 records (96,600 Chinese and 4,900 non-Chinese) were sent to OCLC for Pinyin conversion, approximately 10% of the converted Chinese and 21% of non-Chinese records were marked for review, which are still in process for manual cleanup. In addition, ca. 6,000 records were found not extracted from the database, and thus will need to be send to OCLC in the near future. Diana Jiang added that after records were converted by OCLC, some vernacular data was lost for specific characters such as “tai” for Taiwan, thus the staff needed to fix manually on local system. Also, a number of records with language code “chi” in fixed field that had non-Chinese language codes in addition to Chinese in 041 MARC field were found not converted due to a program error.

Cathy Chiu reported on the experience at Santa Barbara. RLIN converted around 45,000 records to Pinyin for UCSB and 20% were marked for manual review. With both Cathy Chiu and Peter Pang working on manual cleanup, all records were cleaned up by August 15. In the process, they found that some records which had nothing to do with Pinyin had 987 PINYIN field so they had to delete the field. Another problem was with Japanese translations of originally Chinese works, where Japanese word “no” was mistakenly converted to “nuo” which had to be changed back to the original word.

Electronic Publishing Initiatives at Berkeley

1) Japanese Historical Maps from Mitsui Collection

Next, Bruce Williams gave a presentation on Japanese historical maps from Mitsui Collection, as a part of Electronic Publishing Initiatives at Berkeley. The Mitsui Collection, one of the finest rare book collections in Japan, was acquired by Berkeley in 1950s. The Collection contains ca. 2000 old maps of a variety of locations from small cities in Japan to the world, many of which were produced during the Edo period. Considering the value of the Collection and the ease of access, the Library has decided to digitize this map collection and the result is very successful. Users can expand any small area of the map limitlessly from a thumbnail size and the expanded image is sharp and clear with the SID viewer, which can be downloaded from a free site.

2) Visual Culture of Contemporary China

Another presentation from Electronic Publishing Initiatives at Berkeley was given by Annie Chang on the project entitled Visual Culture of Contemporary China which was administered at the Center for Chinese Studies Library. The Library has collected ca.1,000 titles of videos, DVDs, and VCDs since its establishment in 1987, with special focus on post-1949 Chinese politics, economics and social sciences. Using these audio visual materials from silent movies to new releases, the Library has recently created a database which allows individual users to view these materials at ease at the Library. As a new project, the Library is considering to digitize the Library’s holdings of 1,200 photographs taken in China in the past few decades and make the resource available on the Internet as well. The list of Library’s audio visual holdings is available at the Library’s home page: (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/CCSL/coll_film.html) and the materials are available for use through ILL.

Election – EAALC Convenor, 2002-2004, and Host Library for 2003

At the end of the annual meeting, the participants needed to select the next convenor, as the term of Amy Tsiang would complete with this meeting. After a number of names were suggested, the participants by overwhelming support agreed to have William Wong as the next convenor for EAALC. It was also decided that the next meeting would be held at Irvine.

After a brief period of questions and answers, the meeting was adjourned at 4:00 p.m. Tour of East Asian Library was provided individually to interested attendants.

Respectfully submitted,

Toshie Marra

UCLA East Asian Library