Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (Chinese Studies)
2010-2011 Library Enhancement Grant
The University of Florida is home to the largest pool of Chinese scholars in the state. Not only are there four scholars specializing in the language and culture of China currently in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, there are also scholars working on China in the School of Art and Art History, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Religion.
With the expansion of Chinese studies at UF, the libraries have struggled to keep up with all the resources needed to provide both students and faculties the necessary tools for their research. The field of Chinese studies, and indeed the studies of East Asia in general, is constantly growing and both students and faculty need to know what books and articles are available to them for their research. While the UF libraries subscribe to a database of secondary sources in Western languages, no equivalent tool was previously available for finding books and articles written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Seeing the need to fill this gap, Prof. Sean Macdonald and Prof. Richard Wang, with the assistance of a Library Enhancement Grant provided by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, obtained for the UF library the Tōyōgaku bunken ruimoku (東洋學文獻類目), an annual bibliography published in Japan and known in English as the Annual Bibliography of Oriental Studies.
This new resource will provide scholars of China, and indeed scholars studying any facet of Asian studies, with an up-to-date and comprehensive list of recent research in their fields. Written in Japanese and English and divided according to subject areas, the Annual Bibliography is an easy-to-use and comprehensive resource. Users can consult each volume for a specific year to find all the various works published in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean listed by subject area. Faculty working on their research can consult it for information on recent work in their field, while students working on research papers for their classes can use it to find the important recent works they need to read. Drs. Macdonald and Wang acquired for the UF libraries the back issues of the Annual Bibliography, so now anyone using the UF library can look up all relevant eastern scholarship from 1934-2006. Thus, scholars can both keep up-to-date with recent scholarship while also having the tools to insure that they are knowledgeable about all past scholarship. This is an important and meaningful addition to the UF libraries.