Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librarianship
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. . .
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. . .
