After four full days of listening to Chinese, I was able to follow along with Professor Xiao Long of Beijing University fairly closely yesterday. As she narrates each slide, she always says, point number one is. . .point number two is . . .These signposts are oh-so-helpful for the nonfluent. In addition to the slides, during the lecture, Professor Xiao switched to her university library's web site at various points to show us things, such as the digital library of rare books that they are developing with pop-up windows detailing the metadata, as well as  their lists of databases by subject, which resembles the ones we have on our NYU Libraries web site. She also demonstated the vey impressive CALIS platform that they use for federated searching. It is able to search both Chinese and Western-language databases, a capabilty that we are hoping ExLibris' MetaLib will introduce in the near future.

An hour was barely enough time for all four of our groups to make their presentations about strategies for collection development of electronic resources in our second session with Dr. Yuan Zhou of the University of Chicago. However, his keen, concise observations about each one maximized our use of the brief time. The highlight was the presentation/skit in which one person pretended to be a CD resource and the other an online resource: they engaged in a battle of witty one-upsmanship, trading lines that began with "I'm better than you because. . ."

Dr. Allyson Carlyle, associate professor at UW's own Information School, spoke to us for two hours about providing access to digital materials, which in another age would have been referred to simply as cataloging. Listing the acronyms of the topics covered--FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, DCMI, RDA, IME ICC, etc--belies the fact that these are, in many ways, the most exciting and relevant topics of all! We can talk endlessly about  selecting, acquiring, and preserving electronic resources, but If we cannot provide ready access to them, there is no point!

We seem to be acclimated to the pace of the institute now and weren't as brain-tired as on previous days during the last hour of the day, which was occupied by Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee's lecture on library fundraising. Not being involved in this directly, I was not familiar with the science behind it, such as the rule of thirds and the lopsided ratio (the 80-20 rule, again!) and found it interesting.

I didn't participate in the evening's Q&A about copyright with Professor Chen. Alas, if people can't produce cartoon bubbles over their heads containing the characters of the text they are speaking, or speak at the speed of a 78 RPM record being played at 33 1/3 RPM, especially when the topic is law, I can't really get the gist. Yet.

Today's picture is of the gorgeous Suzzallo Library in which our classes take place. It is situated on "red square" (they really call it that because of the brickwork!)!