SULAIR News

The Archive of Recorded Sound, together with Yale Music Library, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive at New York Public Library and Syracuse University, recently completed a joint project funded by the Mellon Foundation to catalog our historical audio collections.

Over the past 3 1/2 years, catalogers at the 4 institutions have created original catalog records for almost 25,000 78 rpm recordings in our collections, including about 7500 created by the Stanford project cataloger Frank Ferko, and shared our cataloging through OCLC batch processed searches developed at Stanford. With the help of people in Systems and several students doing data inputting, we have since downloaded cataloging copy from OCLC for 19,485 10-inch 78rpm discs into Symphony.

Together with Frank’s input, we now have bibliographic records in both Symphony and OCLC for approximately 26,860 78 rpm sound recordings in the Archive of Recorded Sound that previously had no online access.

Jerry McBride, the Stanford director of the project, and I would like to thank the people in Systems, especially Darsi Rueda and Amy McGuire, our partners at the other institutions, our student/casual assistants and especially Frank Ferko, for his fine cataloging work.

Nancy Lorimer, Head, Music Technical Services

The annual conferences of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) for this year has yet one more thing to celebrate: the first book dedicated to the history of East Asian libraries in North America. The book, titled Collecting Asia: East Asian Libraries in North America 1868-2008, is edited by Peter X. Zhou and published by AAS. It tells the stories of the historical development of 25 major East Asian libraries in North America over the past 140 years.

Dongfang Shao, Director of the Stanford East Asia Library, authored Chapter 13 of the book, 'Growing amid changes: Stanford University's East Asia Library', in collaboration with Qi Qiu. The chapter records the history of Stanford's East Asian studies program and the East Asian collection that dates back to 1945.

Turning attention to an important yet often neglected part of the library collection, the incoming book will benefit researchers of Asian studies as well as the general public interested in the development of Asian studies and collecting East Asian materials in the United States. The book will be distributed at the AAS booth of the 2010 CEAL/AAS conference held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown from March 22-28. A special roundtable on March 27 at 5 pm will be put together by AAS about this publication.

Qi Qiu, East Asia Library