Starr News

Fall 1995

Welcome to this first issue of Starr's brand-new newsletter. Much has happened and changed in the Library over the past summer, so this is a particularly opportune time to start this publication. We hope to keep you informed of any new developments in the Starr Library and its collection through the newsletter.

An electronic version will also be available on the Starr Home Page on the World Wide Web. Our url is: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/eastasian/index.html. We encourage you to check us out on the Web. Although our home page is still in an early stage of development, we intend to add new information to it on an ongoing basis.

MOVES AND SHIFTS

While you were away, we moved every volume we have in our collection. Starting right after the July 4th weekend -- after years of promises, planning and preparation -- 45,000 bound issues of pre-1991 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language serials were moved from Kent Hall to the new Off-site Library Shelving on the fourth floor of Prentis Hall, 632 West 125th Street. There they were joined by East Asian materials formerly shelved at the Annex, Lehman and Health Sciences Library. All of Starr Library's holdings are now housed in either the Kent or Prentis buildings. A large proportion of the material now off-site has been entered in CLIO, so when you see the location Prentis - East Asian on the screen, please check with the circulation desk for retrieval information. For CJK items listed in the card catalogs, please refer to the new Guide to Locations on the top of each catalog. If all goes according to plan, all our material shelved at Prentis will have online location information by the end of this academic year.

Moving the bound serials from Kent Hall to Prentis was the first and most straightforward of Starr's summer moves. Coordinating the move of the old CJK collections from three different locations and interfiling them into compact shelving at Prentis involved weeks of meetings, planning and measuring with the moving company, Clancy-Cullen, but all that preparation paid off and the move went without a hitch.

As soon as the serials were moved out, an internal shift of everything remaining in Kent Hall was started by the William B. Meyer Company. With our Dewey Decimal holdings being reclassed into the Library of Congress classification, additional space became available on the 200 level of the stacks and a decision was made to start the LC collection there and have it flow in logical, consecutive order through the stacks from A to Z for the first time in memory. Harvard-Yenching and Nippon Decimal classed materials still in Kent Hall are now housed on the 250 level. The folios were moved from the inaccessible Cage into open shelving, and a shift of Starr's Rare Book and Special Collection stacks was started. Please refer to the enclosed Location Guide to Call Numbers for a map of where materials are now located since nothing is where it used to be. Watch for information about library tours at the start of the semester, and ask for help at the circulation and reference desks if you have any questions.

FOOD AND DRINK POLICY

Eating and drinking in libraries creates a potentially hazardous environment for humans, the collection, and equipment. Not only can the smell of food be very annoying to your fellow patrons, but crumbs, spills, and food trash attract vermin and insects which carry diseases, and literally eat, nest in, and soil books. Therefore, absolutely NO FOOD is allowed in the Library, while only drinks in plastic spill-proof containers can be brought in. Lidded paper coffee cups and soda cans are not spill-proof, and are consequently not acceptable. Anyone found eating, or drinking from containers that are not spill-proof, will be asked to take their food and/or drink out of the library. For everyone's sake, please comply with this policy. We will enforce it.

CHANGES

Dewey disappears

As those of you who have been around this library for a while will notice when you take a tour of our re-organized stacks, there no longer is a special section for materials with Dewey Decimal call numbers. That entire collection is being re-classified into the Library of Congress (LC) system. This means that all those materials are receiving new LC call numbers, and are being integrated into the regular collection. At the same time, their bibliographic records are entered into CLIO, the online catalog, to replace the old card catalog records. Due to lack of manpower many of the now obsolete catalog cards have not been withdrawn yet, so be advised to check CLIO first, and to re-check in CLIO any title you find in the card catalog with a call number preceded by a "D". This does not mean, however, that the card catalogs are entirely obsolete. For a considerable portion of the LC collection (approximately mid-sixties through 1981), as well as portions of the old Chinese, and Japanese collections the only existing records are in the card catalog. Converting records from printed to online versions is a time-consuming and costly undertaking, so the card catalogs will not disappear anytime soon yet. If you have trouble locating materials, do not hesitate to ask a library staff member for help.

Reference vs Non-circulating

Materials designated as "on reference" do not circulate, i.e. you can consult them in the library but you cannot take them out. Until recently all these materials were shelved in the main reading room on the 300 level of the library. However, our reference collection has grown to overflowing. We have, therefore, been forced to re-evaluate this collection, and have had to remove selections from the reference shelves in the reading room. These titles have been moved to the stacks, where they are interfiled with the regular collection. The change is reflected in the holdings records of these titles in CLIO with the new designator "non-circulating". However, they still may only be used in the Library.

As a general guideline for the selection of "non-circulating" materials we chose to move all but the most important yearbooks; highly specialized dictionaries; old editions of encyclopedias, unless they contain unique material not covered in the newer edition; and specialized subject bibliographies. In addition some grossly outdated titles have been withdrawn, and are, where possible, replaced with newer titles.

IMPORTANT NEW ADDITIONS TO THE COLLECTION

Chinese Statistical Yearbooks Columbia has just finished updating its holdings of statistical yearbooks from the People's Republic for the 1994 edition of Yearbooks of the PRC: The Holdings of Twelve Research Libraries. This publication will be available by April in print and will also become available in electronic format via World Wide Web (http://www/lib.berkeley.edu/CCSL). Altogether, Columbia now has 317 titles which are being purchased yearly as they become available. Though holdings from before the 1990s are spotty because many were classified "internal publications," Columbia still has the most yearbooks of any library outside mainland China, with the exception of the Universities Service Center in Hong Kong. If on your travels to China you discover titles or individual issues which we are lacking, Fran LaFleur would appreciate your supplying them for Columbia, and you will be reimbursed.

Genji Scrolls

Through the good offices and generosity of Professor Donald Keene, our Library has received, as a donation from Mrs. Isako Hirose, a reproduction of the Genji Kotobae. This very valuable set consists of four large-sized scrolls. The original, which dates to 1688, is in the possession of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. It is composed of fifty-four paintings, each representing one of the fifty-four chapters of the Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji). Each painting is accompanied by a chapter heading and a brief extract from the corresponding chapter. Twenty-seven calligraphers of known court rank provided two text extracts each. All selected texts deal with a happy occasion of some kind or other, and it is assumed that the set was itself commissioned for a special event. The scrolls will be stored in our Special Collection, and can be viewed by appointment.