Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librarianship
"The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach."
Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee opened his second lecture, "Becoming a Leader," with this quotation by the American educator and clergyman Benjamin E. Mays (1895-1984). After some inspiring guidelines about how to set professional and personal goals, he talked about the phenomenon of the "glass ceiling," particularly as it relates to Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. This was an eye opener to me, who as an American woman had always thought of the term strictly as it applied to my own gender. His subsequent overview of the core competencies needed for leadership was useful, but many of us were even more inspired by what emerged during the Q&A. In response to a question about how he prepared for his first job as library director, Dr. Lee gave us a brief account of his adventures in our profession, beginning in 1958, the year after he arrived in the US and ran out of funding for his graduate degree in education. He spent a lot of time in the library, so naturally he went there first in search of a part-time job. When asked what he could do there, he volunteered to begin as a book shelver. The story of his next five decades, which include a seven-year stint in Thailand, is one of hard work combined with serendipity. We only hope that one of Dr. Lee's retirement projects is the writing of his autobiography.
Poor Professor Chen Chuanfu, the copyright expert! We allowed him to lecture without interruption for the first half of his two hours, but the second was eaten up by nonstop questions from us about the fraught situations in which we sometimes find ourselves and our Chinese materials. What if the distributor of the book I purchased turns out not to have been a legal distributor of the work? If the database to which I susbscribe contains materials to which the database vendor has not been granted copyright? What about the English translation I purchased that the Chinese author never permitted? There are no easy answers, we learned. Nevertheless, Professor Chen agreed to hold an extra session with us tonight, in which he will address more such questions.
Professor Xioa Long of Beijing University Library started our day off right by reducing our workload for her class just a bit. That announcement prompted great applause. Still, tomorrow each of our four groups will lead class discussion based on her four lectures, which promises to be interesting.
The day ended with an introduction to Superstar's Duxiu Digital Library. Unfortunately, rather than being given a chance to do hands-on searching, we were shown two snazzy, jazzy videos about the product, which appears to be a kind of Google/OPAC combo in Chinese. We wish that it could be integrated into the real Google and our OPACs rather than a separate interface, though.
