The Development of East Asian Libraries in North America

The development of East Asian libraries in North America is of recent history. Prior to World War II there were only some half dozen East Asian collections in the United States and Canada. But that number began to increase rapidly after the War. With the establishment of new East Asian collections at universities, problems concerning collection development, cataloging, and personnel began to be a common concern. A series of efforts led by the American Library Association (ALA), the Library of Congress (LC), and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) led to the developing of national cataloging standards for East Asian materials, and the eventual founding of the Committee on East Asian Libraries (later renamed Council on East Asian Libraries, CEAL) of the Association for Asian Studies to better coordinate cataloging, collection development, and personnel training, and later on the introduction of automation in East Asian libraries. This essay is an attempt to trace that development by stage, with tributes paid to two pioneers in that development: Dr. A. Kaiming Chiu, the founding Librarian of the Harvard-Yenching Library of Harvard University, and Dr. Mary C. Wright, the founding Curator of the Chinese Collection at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Some comments are also made on the application of technology in East Asian libraries.