| On a hot and humid August morning in Seoul, Korea, nearly 100 overseas and Korean librarians made their way across the city to meet together on the picturesque Yonsei University campus to discuss a wide-ranging agenda of issues relating to acquiring, cataloguing and managing East Asian library collections. As we entered the imposing campus gates, those of us new to Yonsei University found our thoughtful hosts had every so often signposted directions to the building where we were to meet, so that the long hot walk across campus became a simple exercise of spotting the next sign, in the knowledge we were heading in the right direction. It was a good omen for a meeting that was to explore the complex and confusing landscape of managing Asian collections in the digital age. So where are the signposts to guide the right way through the many issues facing the East Asian library community at present? The Preconference meeting planners had not hesitated to tackle a wide range of issues. They included digitisation, bibliographic standards, electronic resource management, institutional repositories, training issues, collection development and cataloguing, both outsourced and insourced. Once the US delegates had got over the shock of being offered cold coffee to refresh themselves, the meeting began. Keynote address Professor Satoru Takeuchi gave an absorbing account of how early books came to Japan from China and Korea. He spoke of the first known contacts between Japan and China from the 1st century CE onwards, through delegations, exchange of documents and eventually transmission of the Chinese language. With language came writing, books, the development of literacy and ideas. At the end of a scholarly and interesting account, Professor Satori highlighted that because of these early book paths, and even after Japan's isolation period of 1000 years, there were classical works held in Japanese library collections that were no longer to be found in China and Korea. He noted in conclusion that Japanese culture owes much to China and Korea, but he said wryly, 'Japan has not yet repaid its debt'. Developments in Korea Junglim Chae of Yonsei University gave delegates an interesting history and description of Yonsei University, ranked second of the country's top universities after Seoul University and specialising in medicine. The Library was currently undertaking digitisation of early Korean books. Digitisation was being done from microfilm using the DejaVu format, with higher compression for the 'background layer' of data. Junglim noted that viewing access was freely available but printing was only allowed for authorised users and downloading was not allowed. As part of her address Junglim described the history of the book in Korea, where movable metal type was first invented in 1232. The world's earliest extant printed book, 백운화상초록불조직지심체요절 Paegun hwasang ch'orok pulcho chikchi simch'e yojŏl (known colloquially as the Jikji) was printed in Korea in 1377 and is now in the collection of the Bibliotheque nationale du France. Digitisation and bibliographic standards Xian Wu from Cornell University described Cornell's activity in digitising out of print East Asian English language titles. He spoke of the 'long chain' of interested parties -- faculty staff, editors, authors, library staff, copyright lawyers and IT staff -- highlighting the fact that digitisation if it is done properly is not a simple task and involves many decisions and interactions. Cornell are producing OCR digital copies of English language texts with image reproductions and script characters inserted manually. Charlene Chou of Columbia University addressed technical and cataloguing standards issues in her paper 'Access to Chinese resources in global digital libraries'. In fact much of what she said in a wide-ranging and authoritative paper applied equally to all three CJK scripts. She noted the great complexity of Chinese resources and how they had the 2nd largest share of the Internet. She was one of the few speakers to compare library practice and issues in East Asia itself with practice in libraries in other countries with Asian collections: there are many differences but also an opportunity to learn from each other. As an example, Charlene commented on the complexity of searching romanised Chinese words when different word division standards existed in both the RLIN and OCLC databases; but Peking University Library had a better solution than either, using more sophisticated algorithms to deal with sequence and adjacency. She spoke of the challenges of implementing Unicode in the US - libraries there had to deal with multiple languages, thereby increasing the complexity of the task. Unicode, she felt, was a good start but not the complete solution. Charlene informed the meeting that the National Library of China had digitised 85% of post-1949 publications, but she noted there were questions about display, access, management and future development of this resource. The Digital Library, she felt, needed a user group to guide its development. And for the future, Charlene envisioned an OPAC that worked a lot harder to do what Google could not do, using features like topic maps (subject groupings) to present MARC data in new ways. Acquisitions and cataloguing A presentation by Shuyong Jiang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discussed the merits of using vendor records for cataloguing and reported on a study of records from the Chinese vendor CIBTC. Shuyong's study found a high error rate in a sample of 132 pre-order records, with only 31 error-free. Typical mistakes were errors in the title, no sub-title or parallel title, spelling mistakes, wrong main entry, incomplete statement of responsibility, no dates. In discussion Shuyong conceded these were short records used for acquisitions purposes rather than full catalogue records, and that a further study would be needed to assess the quality of full records. This was a useful clarification as other libraries such as the National Library of Australia have found very few problems with CIBTC's full vendor records (for which a fee applies), so experience appears to differ. In another presentation highlighting the value to overseas libraries of indigenous copy records for CJK materials, Hideyuki Morimoto evaluated Keio University records loaded to the RLG database. These formerly JapanMARC records had been converted to MARC21 and although none of them used LC controlled name headings, Hideyuki noted that they needed less editing than Waseda University's WINE or TRC (Toshokan Ryutsu Centre) records. As such they were of benefit to the overseas cataloguing community. Conclusion The day's proceedings raised a number of interesting issues and many of the papers presented held useful insights for managing CJK collections. The quality of the papers was variable, and the presenters may have erred on the side of generosity in including as many as they did. However for colleagues who do not usually have the opportunity to present at a professional conference this was doubtless a good development experience for them. The conference organisers are to be congratulated for mounting all of the papers on the conference website, where they can still be found (http://ohmyvocabulary.com/ifla/ifla_program.php). CJK collection management is a complex field, with differences in standards, codes and technology preventing libraries from realising resource sharing benefits that other libraries take for granted. Libraries in Western countries still have to resolve a number of historical issues such as romanisation standards for Korean script, and the display and search of CJK characters in library systems. On the other hand it is also true that libraries in East Asia tend to view the world from within their own national boundaries, and have little experience of working in a multilingual, global environment. Yet there is a great deal that each side can learn from the other, and in a global digital world this is becoming both a reality and a necessity. |