Category: Tech Trends

Categories
Events Instructions Tech Trends

Instruction Season

Golden sunshine on leaves starting to turn red and yellow against the blue sky. Every day at UBC there are big groups of freshmen being oriented. Two weeks in this new term, and the excitement is still building. Prof. Rea’s new Ph.D student tried to meet one-on-one, but I have to run to the BBLearn Group meeting, already missed a meeting due to the Exhibit. Another Master student stopped me clarifying a seminar room location. I really need to focus on orientation and instruction now.

Half way to the Learning Centre, Prof. Shinn told me the next Wat lecturer, Dr. Wang Fan-sen, is coming in less than two weeks. Not enough time to put up the display if we don’t have all of his books.

Tried very hard to put the exhibit behind me, and so I can concentrate on the instruction. Collaborate is easy to use, so I will wait for Connect to settle in. Yvonne has spent lots of time on my Connect account. I like the best practice part of our group report, but so far, none of us have tried out delivering instruction in Connect. Anyway, it’s a good start for my online instruction that can reach the faculty and students no matter where they are.

Categories
Instructions Tech Trends Uncategorized

New Students’ Orientation

This coming academic year’s orientation starts with Forestry exchange students again. It’s interesting that both Dr. Koerner, whose foundation funded Puban purchase, and Dr. Barber were foresters. Asian Centre’s renovation didn’t seem to bother the group, and I was talking out loud with my biggest voice. Katherine prepared detailed online demos and examples. We came across a microfilm title with Summon search limit with “books or ebooks”. Wonder what other suprises I will be bumping into with the newly designed website and upgraded systems.

Categories
Events Experience Professional Development Tech Trends What others are saying

Highlight of the Trip

Toronto CentreThis year’s CEAL conference focused on the TS restructure, and we at UBC have been there and have done it. Keynote speech by Prof. Dai Jinhua, Friendship with my fellow CEAL members and ROM visit are some highlights of the trip.

Thanks to Stephen’s invitation and arrangement, I was able to skip the official visit to UT and ROM on the 15th, and made it to the keynote. We arrived in the Grand Ballroom earlier to occupy the front seats. Gail Hershatter, the president of the association greeted Haihui and chatted about the necessity of the English version of her book. Zhong Jing had an exciting catch-up with her Peking U prof. Dai. I only read Dai’s writing on Chinese cinema for the MAPPS. She’s tall, has a firm voice, which makes her speech more poweful. Instead of movie or popular culture critic, she criticized both communism and developmental capitalism in the post cold-war era. She tried to redefine current nature of the Chinese society, its class structure and a new global position.

ROM

Haihui has gained all my respect from previous years’ workshops and conference. No matter how intensive the programs are, she always makes time talking and encouraging me with her insights and ideas as a historian. I have found the book she recommended in Koerner: The Warmth of Other Suns.

The Royal Ontorio Museum special visit from its back door was once in a life time experience. We were amazed by Dr. Shen’s intro–over 30,000 objects from imperial China, and only less than 10% is on current display. Over 8,000 people visit the museum everyday during the spring break. We spent a whole afternoon there and were still excited at dinner time reflecting on our visit. Like those stories behind the artifacts and our rare books, there is a fate in everything, so is in our friendship. Feel lucky among my kind and knowledgeable CEAL fellows. Stephen is especially helpful with the Council and Society’s official programs and our small group annual tradition. No regret on this trip. When I rushed through the city centre blocks between meetings, I saw the CN Tower behind some skyscrapers, but had no time to pay a visit. Caught my evening flight with very sleepy eyes. Is it the jet lag? or the bright sunset in Toronto?

Categories
Experience Professional Development Tech Trends What others are saying

Taiwan Impression

It’s very hot and humid. People are friendly, especially the Library staff. My classmates are from all over the world. I am glad getting to know the ladies from Australia, Mr. Shen from Singapore, Brian from Michigan and Roger from Sweden, a serious scholar and very funny person. Hye-jin was the last one registered. She’s lucky having the support from Notre-Dame even months before she starts to work there. Our academic programs are properly recorded here, so just some quick notes on this post.
Evening outing to Yuanshan Hotel. Yilan Musuem
My favourite is the program on Oct. 19.
Hu Shi Park near Academia Sinica. (Picture at the bottom)

Categories
Events Professional Development Tech Trends Uncategorized What others are saying

UVic and DHSI

First time on UVic campus was on April 9th for BC China Scholars’ Symposium. I didn’t expect that sort of strong response to our presentation…I enjoyed my company of Chris, Allison, Tim, Anna, Desmond, and getting to know more China specialists in BC. On the ferry back home, I walked into Allan and Greg who just finished the BCLA annual conference. Greg not only bought me Starbucks, but also informed me the changes and his concerns of RPL.

Digital Humanity Summer Institute brought me to UVic the second time, and stayed for an entire week. Instead of bunnies, I saw deers on my way back to the dorm. Our DigiFun class really had a great time together. We quickly worked out a video report by dipping into each feature we covered, sound, video, web design. We skipped ahead to web 2.0 by posting to youtube.

Categories
Professional Development Tech Trends

All about Rare Books

Just found time to record the last sessions of AAS/CEAL conference. April 1st Panel 289: Chinese Ancient Classics Publishing: Trends & Challenges attracted not only librarians but also scholars including our BC profs.

The NCL director, Ms. Zeng presented the work they have done on the over 50,000 rare titles in Taiwan. They have also funded LC and UW thousands of digital rare books, and uploaded their own rare images to WDL.

President Li Yan, Ancient Classics Publishing Committee of Publishers Association of China, provided us an overview of classics publishing. The government funding was increased up to 20 million Renminbi in 2008. Besides the 80 institutes and thousands of professionals, the annual program has trained over 500 librarians.

Professor Wu Ge talked about his union catlog of Chinese ancient classics. He emphasized the plan of investigating classic collections overseas and getting the rare content back to China. “海外調查, 引歸流失文獻”. I told Prof. Wu over the buffet dinner what I have gained from studying our rare items. They brought me back to Ming Dynasty with full of historical connections. I feel calm, peaceful and am eager to check out all the related sources. He was happy about my progress and 漸入佳境的自我感覺.

I also enjoyed the April 2 panel titled “Who writes the local history”, organized by our own Haihui and Zhaohui as one of the presenters. Prof. Carlitz used Jiading as an example to verify that gazetteers are crucial sources of local information, but they are far from neutral or value-free. Prof. Dennis from Wisconsin introduced the Pelliot gazetteer collection housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Categories
Experience Libraries in China National Library of China Tech Trends What others are saying

The Bar and the Hall

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.

Categories
Events Experience Libraries in China National Library of China Professional Development Tech Trends Uncategorized What others are saying

CJK Joint Session

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.

Categories
Reference Questions Tech Trends

Chinese Movies

Prof. Rea just requested the newly released Chinese movies. How do we get them if they are not legally on DVD yet? I know lots of people have seen them online, but I am not supposed to refer him to do the same thing, or can I? I am sure more and more students only see movies with PPS, that’s why our DVD collection is not moving much.

Categories
Tech Trends

AAS/CEAL Conference

I was overwhelmed at this year’s conference in Atlanta, and still feel wierd no matter what I do here in my office. One thing for sure, we must change our collection development policy. The major East Asian collections have had their books scanned by Google. We should stop buying those big sets of reprints. Open Access development in China will also bring us impacts. American East Asian libraries are bound together this year to negotiate with e-resources vendors…

Spam prevention powered by Akismet