First meeting is going around the table to introduce the 12 largest East Asian Library’s rare book collections. 
Ours ranks the top no.5 in size after LC, Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley, but are in the worst condition. Although a few other libraries haven’t finished their rare book cataloguing, such as LC and UW, they have digitized the rare titles. Just saw Rob’s email on the tested titles, that I can show the colleagues here in Beijing. Thanks Rob and to all your folks!
Category: National Library of China
I couldn’t participate in the TS workshop on the 31st due to this China-North America Library Conference new project meeting. We met at the Tropics Bar in the Ali’i Tower at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The dicussion was focused on the East Asian or Chinese rare books. It’s interesting to learn the uncertainty of LC and all sorts of digitizations going on at each library. Anchi is not only pretty, confident but also bright and flexible, who brought everyone of us into the discussion. What’s the relationship between the two national libraries? Almost all the large East Asian libraries are digitizing the rarebooks, will there be a platform or one-stop searching for our users?
Anchi wrapped up the meeting on time. Michael and I rushed to the exhibition hall at the Convention Centre, where I saw lots of UBC profs. I caught Xu Shu from Shanghai Library and we quickly exchanged our ideas where we had to keep others waiting. This year’s exhibit had a reduced scale, but still nice to see the demos, new publications and databases. Above all, I saw Michael’s digitization project result, some sample images and rare titles were quite eye-catching. It’s very nice of him sharing his latest experience digitizing the rare collection at UW with support form the NCL.
East View’s evening program was fun, and hard to believe I won the prize for guessing IPO as the top search word in CNKI. We had to skip the party time because we had more evening meetings scheduled.
Walking along the beach then into the Hilton Village and Ballroom, I saw a whole lot more attendees on March 30th. This is the first time when Chinese, Japanese and Korean librarians meet for common interest instead of having separate committee meetings. The new format worked out nicely, but we could still cut some speakers out due to their emptiness.
The SCSL dinner and the Second General Meeting, also called 神仙会。The meeting lasted too long, so I brievely talked about our rare collections, my experience of studying Pang Collection and the challenges we are facing in terms of preservation and digitization. I enjoyed the afternoon and evening meetings because I spent some quality time with my mentors, Haihui, Wu Ge, Xu Hong, etc. and I met with new friends–Wang Jun, Li Yan and his funny assistant.
The best part of the meeting is to hear what Chinese scholars are saying about overseas Chinese studies. Prof. Tang Yijie’s keynote speech was quite impressive. He criticized nationalism and self-centered Chinese studies.
James Cheng introduced the top Chinese collections in North America and Guoqing presented all the research projects by Chinese studies librarians in the States. I was happy meeting with colleagues from LC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korean, Singapore, and etc. I have learned a great deal from European colleagues.
It’s the life-time experience. I feel lucky being there and I’m grateful to those people who made this trip possible.
Just thanked my friends for the ride to YVR and then saw the notice about my flight’s delay. Seven hours! Kids were happy seeing me back home so soon. Had to email Beijing right away.
When I received the reply from the National Library of China (NLC), I was so moved and relieved. I was picked up from the Beijing airport by NLC staff around mid-night Beijing time. Mr. Yin even helped me with my luggage and hotel check-in. He had to start working at 6:30 am.
A few hours later, I dressed up and started meeting with all the overseas attendees of the NLC cenntenial celebration.