By GAIL FINEBERG
Scholars gathered at the Library on Oct. 31 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Chinese Section of the Asian Division and extol the value of the largest and most comprehensive collection of Chinese materials outside of China.
Throughout the daylong symposium in the Mumford Room, they recalled the history of the section and discussed the importance of the collection of nearly 1 million volumes, including some ancient encyclopedias and other rare books not available even in China.
Tobie Meyer-Fong, a young professor in the history department at Johns Hopkins University, said she had spent months in China and Japan, researching the cultural history of late Imperial China, only to find that many of the materials she wanted were held by the Chinese Section. "I would go to China and compile lists of what I wanted and then return to the Library of Congress to read them," she said.
She spent so much time in Asian Division reading rooms, researching and writing her doctoral thesis and studying, that she finally bought a house on Capitol Hill.
A Capitol Hill neighbor of hers, Thomas Lawton, former director of the Freer/Sackler Gallery of Art on the National Mall, said he regards the Library of Congress as "my local museum and library." He said his work at the Freer took him frequently to the Chinese Section, where, for example, he could find information he needed about ancient Chinese porcelains.
Scholars come from all over the world to use the collections of the Chinese Section and are amazed at the unrestricted public access to the materials, which may be used with no special arrangements, Lawton said. He added that requests are filled "courteously and promptly." He described one colleague who was "trembling with excitement" as he saw the quality and rarity of volumes in the collection. "Some scholars have greater reverence for the holdings of the Chinese Section than for those of the Freer, and that is something for a museum director to admit," he said. Lawton noted that the Chinese Section holds not just books of interest to scholars, but also calligraphies, paintings and rubbings.
Among those discussing the Chinese Section's history was James S. C. Hu, professor emeritus of library and information science at National Taiwan University. A gift of 933 volumes from the Chinese emperor, Tung-chih, was the beginning of the Library's Chinese collection in 1869. The collection grew to some 16,900 volumes by 1912.
Then followed the "golden age of the collection" from 1913 to 1941, when Chinese acquisitions increased by some 210,000 volumes owing to the desire of Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam (1899-1939) to build a collection whose content and quality would rival those of the great national libraries in Britain and France. Hu detailed the acquisitions of Putnam and his partner, Walter Swingle, a U.S. Department of Agriculture physiologist, whose fascination with China stemmed from his interest in rare plants he believed might grow as well in the United States as in their native China because both countries have common temperate zones. In his search for botanical literature in China and Japan, Swingle discovered rarities he could buy inexpensively for the Library of Congress, and he became Putnam's agent.
Putnam established the Division of Chinese Literature in 1928 and placed sinologist Arthur W. Hummel in charge. The division name was changed to the Division of Chinese and Japanese Literature in 1931, the Division of Orientalia in 1932, and twice more before becoming the Asian Division in 1978.
Richard Howard, former acting chief of the Asian Division, noted that Hummel, "one of the leading Chinese scholars of his generation," added "the choicest rarities" to the Chinese Section, which by 1954 had added 290,000 more volumes.
Today the section's holdings of some 900,000 volumes include more than 50,000 volumes published before 1644. According to section registration records maintained since 1912, more than 4,000 doctoral students from throughout the world have used these materials to complete their dissertations.
Noting that they had had to rely on the Library's old annual reports of acquisitions to discover some Chinese Section holdings, several symposium speakers encouraged the Library to convert all of the section's bibliographic records to online records. "After 1982-83, there are online records. What happened before?" asked James K. M. Cheng, librarian, Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University, who detailed efforts of other major research institutions to digitize their Chinese holdings records.
Cheng also encouraged the Library to negotiate an exchange of online bibliographic records with China's national library in Beijing, to collect journal articles in digital formats, and to digitize texts of its own older materials to make them more readily available to researchers.
Librarians and scholars from other universities urged the Library to expand its acquisitions of recent publications in China. Yuan Zhou, curator at the East Asian Library of the University of Chicago, noted that publications in China have increased from 25,601 in 1981 to 154,526 in 2001, and that new titles increased from 19,854 to 91,416 during the same period. He said library patrons in China are demanding powerful search engines and easy access to documents in electronic formats.
Gail Fineberg is the editor of the Library's staff newsletter, The Gazette.