Library Pasts and Presents: Asian Textual Artifacts in the U.S

The symposium consists of two parts:

• A hybrid roundtable featuring five speakers

  • Time: 12-2pm Pacific

  • In Person: Information Studies Library, SEIS Building 102 

  • Zoom: info provided upon registration

• An in-person hands-on engagement session, with rare books from UCLA Library Special Collections

  • Time: 2:15-3:30pm Pacific

  • Location: Main Conference Room, Young Research Library

About the Speakers:

Su Chen

“Challenges in the Discovery and Access of Contemporary and Historical Chinese Sources”

Discovering Chinese-language materials in general—and primary sources in particular—has long been challenging. Cultural differences, distinct intellectual traditions in organizing knowledge, and the lack of formal library-use education in many East Asian countries all contribute to these difficulties. As a result, both specialists and non-specialists in the language and in area studies may encounter obstacles in discovering and locating relevant resources. In addition, remote access to historical materials and current publications can be difficult when discovery relies solely on catalog searching, making information literacy and primary source literacy skills more important than ever for all types of users. Furthermore, students in the field of East Asian studies often must navigate two or even three bibliographic systems, which further complicates discovery and access.

Su Chen joined UCLA in 2011 to serve as Head of Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library. Her research interests are primarily in English monographs on China studies; archival resources related to China held by libraries and museums in North America; and history of East Asian libraries in USA and Canada.

Meng Tong

“From Archive to Access: Buddhist Primary Resources in UCLA Library Special Collections”

The Archival Collection of Buddhism in Los Angeles (ACBLA), preserved in UCLA Library Special Collections, is a distinctive repository documenting Buddhist communities and institutions in the 19th- through 21st-century United States. The collection comprises four sub-collections: the Buddhist Churches of America Collection, the Zen Center of Los Angeles Records, the Ruth S. McCandless Records on Nyogen Senzaki, and the Oral History of Buddhist Masters in Los Angeles. In this presentation, Dr. Tong introduces ACBLA from a scholar’s perspective, highlighting its potential to engage local communities and to enrich teaching through the use of primary resources. She will reflect on the achievements of her predecessors and discuss her ongoing collaborative work with the archives. The talk will conclude with a preview of a digitization initiative centered on the McCandless Records, one of the ACBLA sub-collections, aimed at expanding access to Buddhist archival materials and fostering broader scholarly and public engagement.

Meng Tong is the Robert H. N. Ho Buddhism Public Scholar at UCLA East Asian Library, where she advances public engagement with the Archival Collection of Buddhism in Los Angeles (ACBLA) and develops innovative instructional materials based on its archival holdings.

Judith Henchy

This discussion is based on my experience building a Southeast Asian Studies Collection at the University of Washington, including as a collaborative initiative with the Northwest Regional Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies. It explores the early focus of SE Asia scholarship in the US, and the initiatives that established rich collections at National Resource Centers around the country—including through the Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions program—and the cataloging challenges these collections face. The histories of colonial scholarship on the region, as well as its diversity of linguistic groups present challenges to collecting; the economic status of some of its post-colonial states, and their lack of infrastructure for international trade, makes acquisitions outside of the Library of Congress structure a gamble. The paper will discuss experiences with exchange and other acquisitions partnerships, as well as national initiatives with foundations, the Center for Research Libraries and the Association for Asian Studies to facilitate preservation and access to primary source materials from the region.

Judith Henchy has been the founding curator of the Southeast Asia collection at the University of Washington Libraries since 1989. She holds a Ph.D. in Vietnamese intellectual history from the University of Washington, and an MLIS from the UC, Berkeley. She has been an active participant in the Association for Asian Studies, establishing the A.L. Becker Prize for Southeast Asian Literature in Translation, and working closely with the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA) and CRL’s SEA Materials Project to preserve Vietnamese vernacular newspapers. She was recognized by the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and is recipient of the UW Distinguished Librarian Award.

Yuzhou Bai

“Collecting paper ephemera at Harvard-Yenching Library”

Ephemera are “materials, usually printed documents, created for a specific, limited purpose, and generally designed to be discarded after use” (SAA Dictionary of archives terminology). Their transient nature makes them a uniquely valuable yet often challenging area of collecting for memory institutions. In this presentation, I will introduce Harvard-Yenching Library’s paper ephemera collection and highlight some common challenges for Asian collections to collect, preserve, describe, and manage ephemera.

Yuzhou Bai 柏宇洲 is the special collections librarian and archivist at Harvard-Yenching Library. He is a member of the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee and the editorial team for the Cataloging Guidelines for Chinese Rare Books (CGCRB). He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University.

Emily Zinger

“Digitizing Hidden Bibliographic Collections from Southeast Asia”

It is estimated that only 1% of the world’s archival collections have been digitized. In some cases, undigitized collections lack even a collection-level description on the internet, effectively hiding these documents from scholars whose searches begin and end online. For over two decades the Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) has worked to ameliorate this problem for Southeast Asia Studies by digitizing, aggregating, and preserving archival collections from and about the region. The project succeeds by combining funding, language skills, subject area expertise, and bibliographic materials from institutions across North America and Southeast Asia. This consortial effort puts SEADL on the vanguard of opening Asian bibliographic traditions to a global audience. Emily Zinger, Southeast Asia Digital Librarian at Cornell University, will address how SEADL’s team navigates questions of sustainability, privacy, cultural humility, international copyright, and descriptive biases to support free and open access to Southeast Asia’s cultural heritage.

Emily Zinger serves as the Southeast Asia Digital Librarian at Cornell University and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship. Emily has an MLIS from McGill University, as well as degrees in English and Psychology from the College of William & Mary.