Inside the World’s Major East Asian Collections. One Belt, One Road, and Beyond

438 Pages·2017·46.644 MB·English

by  Allan Cho, Patrick Lo, Dickson K.W. Chiu

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Inside the World’s Major
East Asian Collections
One Belt, One Road, and Beyond
Allan Cho
Patrick Lo
Dickson K.W. Chiu
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Copyright © 2017 Patrick Lo, Allan Cho, Dickson Chiu. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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List of Interviewees
Inga-Lill Blomkvist–University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Carla Bonò–The Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, Italy
Hing Chao–International Guoshu Association, Hong Kong, China
Sara Chiesura–The British Library, London, United Kingdom
Cristina Cramerotti–Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris, France
Vladimir Davydov–Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Mark Elliott–MAA, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Katarína Feriančíková–CCK-ISC, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Jie Formoso–National Library of France, Paris, France
Marc Gilbert–Lyon Public Library, Lyon, France
Mary Ginsberg–British Museum, London, United Kingdom
Martin Heijdra–Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States
David Helliwell–Bodleian Library, Oxford, United Kingdom
Muneaki Hirano–Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, Tokyo, Japan
Matthias Kaun–Berlin State Library, Berlin, Germany
Sarah Kenderdine–City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Harald Kraemer–City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Richie Lam–Hong Kong Film Archive, Hong Kong, China
x List of Interviewees
Dat-Wei Lau–Library of the French School of Asian Studies, Paris, France
Soline Lau-Suchet–Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations
(BULAC), Paris, France
Shannon Lee–Bruce Lee Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Jack Leong–University of Toronto Libraries, Toronto, ON, Canada
Jan Luffer–Oriental Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic,
Prague, Czech Republic
Toshie Marra–University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States
Bent Lerbæk Pedersen–The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
Heather Rogers–McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Jeffrey Shaw–City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Lisa Song–Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
Raymond So–Hong Kong Sports Institute, Hong Kong (SAR), China
Daniel Sung–National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
Thomas Tabery–Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany
Hamish Todd–The British Library, London, United Kingdom
Benedicte Vaerman–KU Leuven University, Leuven, Belgium
Nathalie Vandeperre–The Royal Museums of Art and History of Belgium,
Brussels, Belgium
Susan Whitfield–The British Library, London, United Kingdom
Marc Winter–University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Chantal Wong–Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, China
Clara D. Yu–Vatican Apostolic Library, Rome, Italy
Authors’ Biographies
Allan Cho is the Asian Studies Librarian at Koerner
Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences divi-
sion. His work also supports community engage-
ment initiatives and cultural programming at the
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University
of British Columbia (UBC) Library. Allan also has
MLIS and M.Ed. degrees from the UBC, and an
MA in History from the UBC history department,
where his thesis, ‘The Hong Kong Wuxia movie:
identity and politics, 1966–1976’, focused on the
rise of the Hong Kong swordplay films across
the Chinese diaspora during the turbulent period
of the Cultural Revolution. He is also an instruc-
tor in the Department of Library and Information
Technology at the University of Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada.
Dr. Patrick Lo is currently serving as Associate
Professor at the Faculty of Library, Information and
Media Science, the University of Tsukuba in Japan.
He earned his Doctor of Education from the University
of Bristol (UK) and has a Master of Arts in Design
Management from the Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, a Master of Library and Information Science
from McGill University (Canada), and a Bachelor of
Fine Arts from Mount Allison University (Canada).
He also took part in a 1-year academic exchange at
the University of Tübingen in Germany from 1990 to
1991. He is efficient in Chinese (both Cantonese and
Putonghua), English and German. Dr. Patrick Lo has presented about 100 research papers
and project reports focusing on librarianship, humanities and education at different local
and international workgroup meetings, seminars, conferences, etc., including: mainland
China, Hong Kong, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Turkey, the US and
Sweden, and at institutions including the Library of Congress (US), Austrian National
Library (Vienna), University of Vienna, National Library of France (Paris), National
Institute of Informatics (Japan), Konrad-Zuse-Center for Information Technology (Berlin),
etc. His research interests and areas of specialty include: comparative studies in library and
information science (LIS), art and design librarianship and information literacy. His recent
publications on LIS include:
xii Authors’ Biographies
Dickson K.W. Chiu received the BSc (Hons.) degree
in computer studies from the University of Hong
Kong in 1987. He received the MSc (1994) and the
PhD (2000) degrees in computer science from the
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
He started his own computer company while study-
ing part time. He is now teaching at the University of
Hong Kong and has also taught at several universities
in Hong Kong. His research interest is in library and
information management with a cross-disciplinary
approach involving workflows, software engineer-
ing, information technologies, management, security
and databases. The results have been widely published in over 200 papers in inter-
national journals and conference proceedings (most of them have been indexed by
Science Citation Index (SCI), SCI-E, Engineering Village (EI) and Social Sciences
Citation Index (SSCI)), including many practical master’s and undergraduate project
results. He received a best paper award in the 37th Hawaii International Conference
on System Sciences in 2004. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the International
Journal on Systems and Service-Oriented Engineering. He also serves on the editorial
boards of several international journals. He co-founded several international work-
shops and co-edited several journal special issues. He also served as a programme
committee member for over 100 international conferences and workshops. He is a
senior member of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a life member of the Hong
Kong Computer Society.
Foreword
Cultural institutions welcome everyone regard-
less of gender, race, ethnicity or means. Although
we endure to serve our communities in the
broadest sense, simply espousing this attitude
in our mission statements is simply not enough.
We live in an increasingly globalised society, a
‘global village’, as some would put it. Libraries,
archives, art galleries and museums are in a piv-
otal position to strengthen their communities
through programs, collections and services, and
perhaps even more critically by creating environ-
ments of inclusion, empowerment and compas-
sion. This timely publication, Inside the World’s
Major East Asian Collections: Conversations
with the World’s Leading East Asian Librarians,
Archivists and Curators, is a collection of
interviews embedded with powerful stories of
practical and personal practices of managing col-
lections dealing with East Asian materials.
Although the chapters serve as helpful ref-
erences, the focus of each one is not research-
oriented, but effective best practices and
in-depth elaborations on historical and heritage
institutions that have been developed, tested
and proven to be successful in serving the
needs and interests of their users and patrons,
be it a library, museum, art gallery or archive.
Each section is enriched with articles by lead-
ing experts from multiple perspectives and all
types of cultural institutions from across the
world. These selected authors bring a wealth of
experience from their work in diverse areas of
collection management.
This is an important book because it invites
its readership to step out of their own cultural
identities and explore the types of East Asian
xiv Foreword
collections around the world that capture and excite our understanding and knowledge
of ‘Asia’. By reading the stories of successful managers of collections, we can then
begin to develop cultural appreciation and awareness of the truly global village we live
in. Only then can we design better programs and services that not only encourage use
among our clientele, but also provide opportunities for our communities to develop a
deeper understanding and empathy for the multiple perspectives of others within their
communities.
I have always believed that culture is capable of building bridges when politics and
special interests have caused cracks. Therefore, I was really pleased with the partici-
pation of our Library, display of the Vatican culture, to this initiative.
Jean-Louis Bruguès, O.P.
Archivist and Librarian, Holy Roman Church
Preface
The genesis of this book came from a common theme of the challenges of librarians
who face continuous challenges in shrinking budgets, increased workloads and con-
stant change in information technologies. As we gradually worked our way through
our discussions, we realised that these themes go beyond just libraries, but also cultural
institutions as archives, museums and to a certain extent, art galleries, what is now
more commonly known as a whole as LAMs (Libraries, Archives and Museums). One
might ask, why focus on LAMs? We argue that the present convergence is actually a
return to traditional unity. These three institutions (LAMs) share epistemological links
dating from the ‘Museum’ of Alexandria and continuing through the cabinets of curi-
osities gathered in early modern Europe. But over time, these collections expanded,
they became more specialised and their storage was separated according to the form
of information and kinds of users. After the 19th century, these institutions profes-
sionalised, and intellectual societies and educational programs materialised that crys-
tallised the formal separation.1 We have come full circle. For us to focus on only one
but not the other would be to give an incomplete picture as to the continued merger
of LAMs.
Our book, Inside the World’s Major East Asian Collections, is thus based on
a series of direct interviews with different practicing librarians, archivists and
museum curators across the world who specialise in East Asian collections. In try-
ing to examine the dynamically shifting role of the cultural institution in the context
of managing information, cultural and knowledge exchanges and collaboration on a
global scale, we target this book to serve as a reference guide for students, scholars,
researchers and professionals who manage East Asian collections, enabling them
to gain a glimpse of the vast amount of treasures available for their research and
other scholarly activities. As LAMs began their histories mainly as collecting insti-
tutions with mandates to preserve and make accessible primary sources valuable
for researchers, we want to show in this book how we are coming full circle again
with the merger of practices and techniques of managing collections across cultural
institutions.
1 Marcum, Deanna. (2014). Archives, libraries, museums: Coming back together? Information & Culture:
A Journal of History, 49 (1): 74–89.