Chinese Canadian Library Weblog

I was stopped by an user and late for the Diversity Caucus, but saw this news coming in. Min has been chosen by the (ALA) Emerging Leaders program through a competitive process for the 2011 program. CALA will provide her with financial support for expenses towards attendance at both of the ALA conferences, up to $1000 total.

Min sent her best regards to all friends here in Vancouver!

What a bright and colorful Saturday morning. Driving along Marine to Point Grey is such an enjoyable experience. Only a few early bird photographers are busy in our garden. Students are not up or out yet and the entire campus is peaceful and quiet.

A few deadlines today and need to follow up on the previous weeks’ delegations. There have been many of them from China this term. The OCLC Library Directors Delegation came to UBC directly from the airport. They started working while suffering from the jetlag. They are young and actively discussed about the differences they haver observed when I led them to Asian. They apologized for keeping me late at work. Ms. Huang, from OCLC Beijing office suddenly realized that we met 4 years ago in Wuhan U., when I was teaching the workshop there. She said no wonder the campus and the buildings look familiar, she saw them already years ago on my ppt slides and she’s excited seeing them in person. When we two chatted in front of Asia Centre, it’s getting late and dark, we both feel a bit dreamy and wonder how small the world is becoming…

I had a very busy summer, and wasn’t able to dedicate any time here. During these two busy shopping weeks, I feel so happy to help some clueless new comers and see the friends back on campus. Just bummed into HsingYuan, who reminded meGu Xiong’s event this evening; Met with Prof. Jing, Swatek, Brooke and Chen Jinhua last Friday and the Peking U profs. The new smiling faces make me cheerful and talkative. 20 new MAPPS grad students all came to my orientation and have met a few Asian Studies very polite students. Will give them orientation soon.

BC China Scholars Forum brought together China specialists from across British Columbia on April 9th and 10th. Although I had reference shifts and the Asian Viola, I managed to present our rare book collection and gathered quite a lot feedback and suggestions. Alison said that there are about 250 of us in BC, many are not from traditional area studies fields. Some profs asked for my full paper, I will try to find time for it. Wonder if I shall submit to print publications in library or Asian Studies.

Prof. Bryant told me how he benefited from Puban when he studied at UBC. He even sent me a long email about some rare editions that he conducted research on in Asia and did the comparison with our Puban titles. Bless his heart! Will follow up. Thanks to Allan, we may enter the whole forum into cIRcle this year. Many good presentations, Kang Youwei in BC sounds fascinating to me, Prof. Brook’s research on the Ming daily life expenditure, the new mental health programs in China, and etc all attrated interesting discussion. Too bad, I missed the session more related to MAPPS, chaired by Prof. Cheek.

Bummed into Prof. Gu Xiong today, who reminded me his presentation “Becoming River” and the exhibition in MOA. At the end of the Forum, Prof. Gu gave me, Richard and Jeremy a special tour of MOA right before the Keynote. MOA was bright right and I enjoyed the sun set stroll and chat with the gentlemen. We saw the “river” made of thousands of little white boats, floating from the Pacific Ocean into MOA…

It’s my third visit and very different one. Riding a taxi with Tim to downtown, our busy chat covered Beijing, Shanghai, UBC, cooperation challenges, political bias and … here’s downtown Philly.

I took my suitcase to the first SCLC meeting in a Malaysian resturant. Gentleman Cheng Hong from UCLA ordered spicy food for me, as hot as the discussion, while Shuyong’s working with her laptop and greeting me the same time. We happily squeezed ourselves into the first Society photo. The small meeting followed the big one. That’s dedication and professional! It was quite late when i checked in to Marriott.

We had very open discussion at the second SCLC meeting by the end of CEAL conference. Besides, I was struck the most by meeting with Jin Yilin, who reminded me how much e-resources out there, and how tricky it is for us to differentiate those commercial ones from institutional ones. The translation with Su and Shi for the next day presentation kept us up until 3am.

Another impressive talk was by the gentleman from Google, who reminds us in a decade or so, all books will have their digital format, or born digitally.

The group visit to the Art Museum is the only outing, which completely changed my first impression of this historical city in the States.

As always, I enjoy our friendship the most at CEAL. This year, I made a few new friends. Time to contact them.

Paul looks much younger than I thought, and looks alot like his Grandpa, Mr. Pang Jingtang, a typical Shandong big man. As a lawyer in Vancouver, he speaks fluent English, not Chinese. The way he talks about his family and the donnation sounds very humble. Paul told me a very different story of how the Pang’s Collection was donated to the Library. After his Mom, Ms. Pang Yi, an UBC graduate, passed away in 2000, he made many phone calls to UBC. Dr. Cheung told him that he went all the way to Martha.

We talked about his Grandma, Ms. Yang Baolin, who was an active political woman in Taiwan. I told Paul that I was viewing her video clip before we started the event. I also shared a good news with him, as my Chinese colleague, Ms. Gu Min, has just located some rare books with Pang’s seals in Shandong Provincial Library, which matches the information from the Heze Gazetteers. Paul’s eyes sparkled as he speaks “so my grandpa donated the rest of his books to the library”. Yes, at least those left in Shandong, and they are still there after all the wars and the Cultural Revolution. Unlike his grandma, Paul’s mom was a private person, who may visited her father twice in the 1970’s.

The title list of Pang Jingtang Collection to UBC may not mean much to him, so he questioned about the collection’s research value and insisted to have them digitized and shared on the web asap. I only started looking into them a month ago, there are still lots of questions and evaluation needs to be done, but I did give him the numbers of unique, rare and very rare according to the criteria in China. Paul is fascinated and told me about his mother’s scroll collection and other documents, which he will bring to a later dinner.

I am still receiving emails from American and Chinese colleagues on the Winter Olympics. The busy spring term is supposed to be back to normal now, but people are talking more about the closing ceremonythan work.

For February 2010, I had options of travelling far to Cape Town or staying in Vancouver to get involved. I am glad I stayed and changed. This pride and excitement may never disappear from my second hometown. Ok, back to work now.

I was at the busy ref desk when I saw his smiling face. He proudly brought me his West Canada Weekly. This is the first time I saw Xiaomeng after he graduated. 略显消瘦的小萌自己创业，义无反顾地离开了我们的行业。他在闯荡中已经对温哥华内外的政商两界非常了解。春节前能见到这位老弟很高兴，而且今后本地媒体又多了自己人。我马上对他说，亚洲馆50周年的广告问题就由他解决了。年轻就是本钱呀！

While I try hard to recover from the nasty flu, I had a terrible car accident over the weekend. My new SUV is not drivable! The old gentleman who hits my car seems to be ok, and lucky enough I am OK.

I felt sorry and guilty for not getting together with the local librarian friends this year. 8 American friends are coming this week for the Olympics and stay in our house. When I feel a bit under depression and stress, Mindy’s greeting popped in and brighten up my weekend, so pasting here as a new year greeting to all of us. Way to go, Mindy!

Here is an early Happy Chinese New Year greeting to you! Ever since my LIS study years, I’ve always looked upon you as my mentor for librarianship, so I’d like to send you some updates about my work here at UCF. 2009 was quite a blessed year for me. I was nominated for the Excellence Librarianship award in my university and was selected after winning the most votes among the library faculty. It’s quite an honor and encouragement for a junior level librarian like me, since the awardees (one for each year since 1984) in other years are all veteran librarians with at least more than 10-15 years’ professional experience. Plus, the monetary side is also pretty attractive :>. The award will be presented in this April. As to services, I’m honored to be appointed to the upcoming chair for the FLA Continuing Committee and the Vice President/President-elect for the CALA SE Chapter.

吴老师带来了她CHIN403的学生，像个小型的联合国，把Asian-616挤满了。我让出了自己的座位，站着讲完。老外同学能这样认真地听我神侃，真的很感动，不如全职教书算了。坐在我旁边的哥们儿最可爱，不仅提出了很好的问题，居然还用中文跟“刘老师”开玩笑！我提到了即将开展的问卷调查和今年的工作重点。Better make a note here. Their responses include: terrible lighting, study carrel computers don’t have the instant online translation software. They wish Asian Library projects can give them hiring priority as student assistants, so they can practice their Chinese at work.

他们中的一些是瞄准了亚洲或中国研究的。其浓厚兴趣让我想起了老何，金发碧眼、大块头，做的是急救工作，同时又是中国通。老何的中文比我们外交部的中国通们都不弱。他不以中文功底为谋生的手段，完全是兴趣、自得其乐。圣诞party上把酒听老何侃金庸、梁羽生和倪匡、、、似乎是很久以前的事了。星源的中国艺术史的学生来了三批，正赶上CHIN403的学生往外走，还不忘说， “谢谢刘老师，老师再见！”好可爱！