Dawn’s posterous

The weekend's Symposium on CNKI Standards and Chinese e-Publishing having concluded, yesterday marked the formal beginning of the two-week-long institute. FIVE people gave welcoming speeches during the opening ceremony, one of whom even remarked that the speaker parade gave it the feeling of a true Chinese event. Each was sincere and had something memorable to impart to us. Most memorable, perhaps, was the quotation from a Canadian science fiction novel (no further citation was provided): "Librarians are the hidden masters of the masters of the universe of the universe [i.e., the universe of information]. Don't piss them off." Also, it was very exciting to learn that an event like this was held here 20 years ago, which of our welcomers had attended. Peg Walther, who is now at the US Embassy in Beijing, was asked to be a note-taker at that institute by its organizer, the legendary Chinese studies librarian Karl Lo. Phil Melzer of LC--immediate past president of the Council on East Asian Libraries, an organizer of this event--had gone through his notes from the time in preparation for his talk and regaled us with quotations from them about technology and budget worries that sounded as if they could have been written yesterday.
Next on the program was, naturally, the keynote speech. The schedule listed its length as two hours, and many of us had wondered if that wasn't a typo. How could someone hold our attention for that long? We had been already been joking with one another about the fatigue that had accumulated from the intensity of the weekend symposium on top of our jet lag. However, if any speaker is going to be able to keep you wide awake and stimulated, it is Professor Ching-chih Chen of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library Science. She practically jumps up and down with enthusiasm about her topic, which is her own National Science Foundation-funded project, the Global Memory Net:. After skilfully explaining the visionary ideas behind it, Professor Chen gave a live demonstration of the site. Visit it yourself to check it out, and be sure to note the range of searching techniques it allows. In particular it provides for searching of similar images with one click using content-based image retrieval, which works pretty darned well and is only going to get better.
We had our first two classes in the afternoon, the accompanying PowerPoints of which will be posted on the institute website. I found Jim Cheng's observations on the UC San Diego's experience as a GoogleBooks participant especially fascinating. As we know, the concept of authority control is still not widely understood outside libraries, and he showed some vivid examples of this. GoogleBooks creates a linked GoogleMap to its books with balloons showing the placenames mentioned in the text. It is truly cool. However, if a person's name or other word matches a placename it has on file, it gets linked on the map, completely irrelevantly. Of more concern, however, is that books that use old forms of placenames, such as Pekin or Hankow, just don't link, which leads one to wonder when viewing a GoogleBook from the late 19th century about places like those but that don't show them mentioned on the map.
In the evening we were given an in-depth tour of UW's East Asia library by its director, our unfailingly generous and utterly indefatigable host, Zhijia Shen, who is a key driving force behind this amazingly comprehensive learning experience.
Yesterday's happenings were largely in English, so my brain had a brief break for absorption of the weekend of Chinese. I think I will have linguistic challenges today, though. . .

   

Yesterday's half-day of presentations was a useful continuation of our dialogue with the vendor about their product and the requirements of our libraries. Like other East Asia-based companies with whom we do business, CNKI is in a difficult position in that they create and design their product for the far larger local market and find that we are not shy about expressing the ways in which our needs. One presenter made a very strong argument in response to the frequently raised point that North American libraries consitute only a small part of the market for Chinese vendors' products, so the vendors needn't be overly concerned with our demands. He pointed out that the publications and teaching of the users who constitute this small market of scholars in North American research libraries have a great deal of influence in the international academic and political arenas.  After two days of interaction in the form of formal presentations and informal encounters at meals, however, each side seems to have come to a deeper understanding of the other.
Today we begin our two weeks of actual classes about all aspects of Chinese librarianship. I hope that the vocabulary items I absorbed over the past two days will stand me in good stead.

   

I'm trying out this new microblogging site as a way to capture some of my experiences at this two-week program in Seattle: http://www.lib.washington.edu/East-Asia/institute/institute.html. Yesterday we had the first of the two-day preconference, called Symposium on CNKI Standards and Chinese E-Publishing. The packed program lasted from 8 AM till after 5 PM, and each presenter had far more content he/she wanted to deliver than time would allow, so sessions often went over. But the order of sessions was very well thought out, so the very stimulating day flew by. Basically, presentations by the creators of China's largest electronic journals database, Tongfang Knowledge Network Technology Group (TKN) , about the inner-workings and, most significantly, future plans for expansion of their product, alternated with commentary from the Chinese studies librarians of major US universities. The comments always led to extremely lively discussion. Some of the commentators were given access to a beta version of TKN's  new platform ahead of time so that they could assess it. A major critique of the new platform was that the interface, even the initial search screen, was far too busy. This was particularly glaring at a time when most US databases are slimming down to an austere, one-search-box interface, at least for the primary view. I'm wary of labeling things as cultural differences, but this may be one. A Chinese person suggested to me yesterday that it may be an irrepressible desire to be comprehensive. This rings true not only of the database interface, but also of the PowerPoint presentations about it that we were shown. Many were filled with the equivalent of at least a page of text! A far cry from the rule of thumb one often hears about the need to limit bullet points to three to five and the text associated with each to fewer than ten words.
In the discussions, the librarians expressed a strong desire for TKN to let their database be indexed by Google for display in Google Scholar. We all know that despite our best efforts, students and faculty often start their searches at Google rather than at our library home pages. A study has shown that since JSTOR was indexed by Google, student use of its resources has increased signficantly. Ah, that explains why my patrons come to me saying they couldn't find something, the library must not have it because it's not in JSTOR!
Friends and colleagues know that the big personal story for me here is that unlike all of the other attendees, I am not a China specialist first and foremost and do not have the native or near-native fluency in the language of all the others. Yesterday's presentations were ALL in Chinese, and the talk did sound like it was going millions more miles per hour than any of the language tapes I listened to in preparation. But as I anticipated, the study of Chinese that I have had and my knowledge of characters from decades of studying Japanese meant that I could follow along with those densely written PowerPoints to some extent. I relied heavily on the handy Pleco dictionary in my Palm Treo, which has character recognition, so I can quickly scrawl the character on the screen to get a pronunciation and definition. Naturally, because the presentations and most of the rest of the institute will be concentrated in one topic area, the vocabulary items recurred. By the end of the day, I could refer to the list of words I was handwriting as I went along rather than needing to look them up in the dictionary.