From Print to Digital: Visions of 21st Century Collections

PRDLA, 10.21.10

Thomas C. Leonard

University Librarian, University of California Berkeley

Timothy R. Tangherlini of UCLA

• Prof. Tangherlini is a professor in Scandinavian Section, and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. His main geographic areas of interest are the Nordic region (particularly Denmark and Iceland), the United States, and Korea.

• He is the author of Interpreting Legend: Danish Storytellers and their Repertoires (1999) and the co-editor of Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity (1999)

• Sitings. Critical Approaches to Korean Geography (2008). He has also produced Our Nation. A Korean Punk Rock Community (2002).

Chenxi Tang of Berkeley

• Should we, then, join the Japanese scholar Elizabeth Berry, in celebrating our “flamboyantly ambitious history of global engagement throughout our great institutions” with their “boundary-free riches”?

• From COLLECTING ASIA: East Asian Libraries in North America, 1868–2008 (2010) Peter X. Zhou, ed.

HathiTrust Language Count

HathiTrust Metrics shows us a distant Galaxy

More than 3 million books from the University of California have been

scanned and we retain the digital copy.

• For non-English language imprints: patience,

patience, patience.

• American courts must approve the Google Book

Search Settlement, THEN we work on foreign

imprints not in the public domain.

"I would think Ibsen had a much larger impact on China than anywhere else in the world,”

Prof. He Chengzhou, Nanjing University

• More people read Ibsen in China than in Europe (because of the school curriculum).

• More Chinese probably recall the A DOLL'S HOUSE than they do the name of the author.

• More Chinese are familiar with the character Nora than they are with the name of that play.

• Librarians who know Norwegian but not Gender Studies may miss the point.

Law may be the real barrier to “boundary-free riches”

What drives collections today?

• Hard Power (geopolitics & economics) • Soft Power (culture) • An emerging force is NGO Power, focused on

human rights and environmental concerns. (People not all that interested in the culture or financial/political alignment of Asian states are beginning to drive collections.)

Free Burma Rangers-Southeast Asia

In 2009, University of Texas Libraries began collaborating with Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a non-profit organization based in Southeast Asia, that provides humanitarian aid to internally displaced Burmese refugees and documents human rights violations that have occurred under the military dictatorship in Burma and Myanmar.

Note: Access to these materials is currently limited to Free Burma Rangers staff, due to the sensitive nature of the information.