Warren Tsuneishi retired Feb. 3, after 30 years of service in the Library of Congress as chief of the Orientalia (later Asian) Division and as director of the former Research Services Department.
A native of California, Dr. Tsuneishi began his college education at UCLA and two years later transferred to the University of California at Berkekey. With the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, he was evacuated to a relocation center in Wyoming, but by January 1943 was able to enroll at Syracuse University, where he completed his undergraduate education in August of that year. He then volunteered for military service.
In 1946 he enrolled at Columbia University, where he received a master's degree from the Department of Chinese and Japanese (1948) and a master's from Columbia Library School. In 1960 he received his doctorate from Yale University.
Dr. Tsuneishi began his library career in 1950 at Yale University Library. In 1957 he came to the Library of Congress to head the Cataloging Department's newly created Far Eastern Languages Section, but in 1960 returned to Yale to resume his position as Curator of the Far Eastern Collection. Returning to the Library of Congress in 1966, he became the chief of the Orientalia Division, a position he held until the Library's reorganization of 1978, at which time he was promoted to director of area studies in the Library's Research Services Department.
With the Library reorganization of 1989 he was appointed chief of the Asian Division (until 1978 the Orientalia Division), a position he retained until the time of his retirement.
During his 30 years at the Library of Congress, Dr. Tsuneishi participated in several important developments in East Asian librarianship. In the late 1950s, as head of the Far Eastern Languages Section, he was the first to supervise the Library's cataloging of Chinese-, Japanese- and Korean-language materials in accordance with newly established cataloging rules that standardized the use of both romanized and vernacular data on newly formatted LC printed cards.
In the 1960s, in the heyday of the National Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging (NPAC), Dr. Tsuneishi, helped plan the Library's only NPAC center in East Asia, established in Tokyo in 1968.
In the 1970s, he assisted in plans coordinated by the Library of Congress to send the first American delegation of librarians (represented by LC, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and Association for Asian Studies) to the Peoples's Republic of China, for which he received the Library's Superior Service Award.
In the 1980s, he served as the Library's representative to the Research Libraries Group (RLG) East Asia Program Committee during the period when RLG, with the cooperation of the Library, was developing online network cataloging of East Asian-language materials. And in the early 1990s, he played a leading role in the planning and negotiations with the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership that resulted in the establishment within the Asian Division of the Japan Documentation Center.
Dr. Tsuneishi was active in several library and academic organizations. As a member of the Association for Asian Studies, he served on the Executive Group of the Committee on East Asian Libraries and on the advisory committee of the association's Bibliography of Asian Studies. He was a member, and in 1967 chairman, of the Special Subcommittee on Romanization of Japanese of the Z-39 Subcommittee of the American Standards Institute, and also served as chairman (1966-68) of the East Asian Acquisitions Committee of the Association of Research Libraries. He was also a member of the American Council of Education's International Education Project Task Force on Library and Information Resources, and from 1975-78 served on the East Asian Libraries Steering Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Of special interest to Dr. Tsuneishi was the field of international library relations, an area in which he served with distinction in several organizations. From 1975 to 1980 he was chairman of the American Panel of the Subcommittee on Libraries of the U.S.-Japan Conference on Education and Cultural Interchange (CULCON), and in 1983 he was elected president of the International Association of Orientalist Librarians, a position he held until 1991. He was a member of the American Advisory Committee of the Japan Foundation (1982-84) and of the U.S.- U.S.S.R. Commission on Library Cooperation (1987-91).
Perhaps his most substantial contributions in this area were his activities on various committees of the American Library Association, where he was a member of the International Relations Committee (1987-89), the Armenian Earthquake Relief Committee (1989-91) and chair of the International Relations Round Table (1983-84). Of particular note was his work over a period of 25 years as a member of the ALA International Relations Advisory Committee for Liaison with Japanese Libraries, where he played a major role in organizing five U.S.-Japan Conferences on Library and Information Science and in editing and preparing for publication the proceedings of these conferences; the most recent is scheduled for publication in Tokyo in 1993.
Richard C. Howard retired Dec. 31, 1992, after more than three decades of service to the Asian studies community of librarians and scholars, initially in the East Asian Library of Columbia University, then as the curator-librarian of the Wasson Collection at Cornell University and finally as the assistant chief of the Asian Division (and its predecessor the Orientalia Division) of the Library of Congress.
Born in Kitchner, Ontario, Canada, Dr. Howard received his early education in Ontario. He first matriculated at the University of Western Ontario, and then following two years of service in the U.S. military, transferred to Columbia College, where he received his A.B. cum laude with "special distinction in Chinese." Continuing his graduate studies in the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Columbia, he specialized in Chinese intellectual history.
From 1951 to 1956, Dr. Howard served as China specialist in the East Asian Library at Columbia responsible for the acquisition and descriptive cataloging of Chinese works, as well as bibliographical and reference work. He then spent two years in Taiwan and Hong Kong on field training and research fellowships, returning to Columbia in 1959 as a lecturer in Chinese and assuming the position of research associate and deputy director of the Columbia University Research Project on Men and Politics in Modern China, a position he retained until 1963. The product of the project was the still standard four-volume Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (Columbia University Press, 1967- 71), of which he was the associate editor. This dictionary continued the pioneering biographical directory Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912, in two volumes, edited by Arthur W. Hummel, the first chief of the Orientalia Division (Government Printing Office, 1944).
Dr. Howard served as curator-librarian of the Wasson Collection on China at Cornell University in 1963-76, and from that position came to the Library of Congress as assistant chief of the Orientalia (now Asian) Division. From 1979 to 1983, and from 1986 to 1988, he also served as acting chief of the division. He was responsible for implementing the use of automated catalogs in the division, and in the 1980s, when the Library began with the Research Libraries Group to develop vernacular cataloging records in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), he served on the Processing Services CJK Management Committee.
He also served on a number of other Library or service unit committees covering areas such acquisitions, collections security, collection priorities and levels of cataloging, the future of the LC card catalogs, serials management, future space needs and preservation microfilming. In 1983 he received a Superior Service Award, and in 1984 and in 1988, he received Meritorious Service Awards.
A major contributor to the work of the Association for Asian Studies, he was elected by his colleagues to membership in the AAS China and Inner Asia Council for the term 1977-80 and served as coordinator for the council's "State-of-the-Field" program. Previously, he had edited the annual volumes of the Bibliography of Asian Studies from 1963 to 1970; and served on the BAS Advisory Committee in 1971-84.
Dr. Howard was also a leader in the AAS Committee on East Asian Libraries (CEAL). He served two terms as a member the CEAL Executive Group from 1969-71 and 1974-77 and as chair of its Subcommittee on Publications, 1976-80, and concurrently as editor of the CEAL Bulletin. He was elected chair of CEAL for 1982-85.
Dr. Howard appeared on numerous panels organized by the Association for Asian Studies and other scholarly bodies, either presenting papers on Chinese history and on library-related issues or serving as chair, discussant or rapporteur.