Starr News

Fall 1997

Welcome back to another academic year, and to those of you who are new to Columbia, welcome aboard! Now that everyone is settled in for the semester it is time for us to bring you up to date on what is going on in the C. V. Starr East Asian Library. Below you will find information on recent as well as planned activities; we have announcements to make, issues to explain, and we want to bring you up-to-date on developments and changes in the provision of information sources.

This newsletter is published twice a year - once in the fall and once in the spring - and aims to keep you informed of library developments and activities that concern our public. In the very near future, both this issue and an archive of back issues will be loaded onto our homepage at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/eastasian/index.html. In addition some of us will be working actively to upgrade and expand our homepage in other respects as well, so stay posted and check us out. We always appreciate yo ur input, so if you have any suggestions for features you would like to see included in the future, either in the newsletter or on our homepage, do contact us anytime. A list of primary public service contacts is appended to this newsletter for your convenience.

STAFF NEWS

On August 19, 1997 our desk attendant Rongxiang Zhang gave birth to Max Chu, a beautiful baby boy. Rongxiang is currently on maternity leave, but we look forward to welcoming her back to the library again on October 16.

Starting September 1, 1997 our other desk attendant, Alex Brown, changed jobs within our library. He is now in charge of Stacks and Collection Maintenance. His activities in this position have already made a visible difference.

And starting September 11, Rich Jandovitz rejoined our ranks, after a ten-year absence, taking over from Alex as Circulation Desk attendant. He can be reached at 854-4318.

READING ROOM CLOSED OCTOBER 20

For a University-sponsored event, the main Reading Room will be closed to users on Monday, October 20, until 4:00. The rest of the Library, and all regular services, will continue as normal. Please try to plan in advance for your reference and periodical needs. Standard dictionaries will be available in special book trucks near the elevators for you to use in other locations within the Library.

STACK MAINTENANCE

As a result, in part, of your comments, as well as those of faculty and graduate students from other disciplines, and following suggestions made by the Libraries' external review committee as well, the Columbia University Libraries system as a whole, with Starr as a participant, is working toward improving stack maintenance dramatically. We hope you have already noticed an improvement in our stacks. Work will be continuing on improved shelving, shelf reading, shifting, and maintenance. If you have any comments or concerns regarding stack maintenance you can contact our Director, Amy Heinrich. She can be reached at heinrich@columbia.edu.

TIBETAN ACQUISITIONS

The C. V. Starr Library is working to improve its holdings of modern Tibetan materials and also scholarship in both Tibetan and Chinese on Tibetan history, literature, and religion. We now have on order the Bod-Kyi Dus Bab (Tibet times), a twice-monthly Tibetan-language newspaper from Dharamsala, which will be housed near the Korean newspapers when it begins to arrive. We have also ordered Lungta, the quarterly English-language journal of the Amnye Machen Institute. If you have any suggestions for Tibetan acquisitions, please speak to Fran LaFleur, or contact her via email at lafleur@columbia.edu.

PRENTIS MOVE

During the first week of August, nearly 16,000 volumes were moved from Starr's collection in Kent Hall to our off-site stacks on the fourth floor of Prentis Hall. Most of the volumes comprised two additional years (1992 and 1993) of bound CJK serials which joined the earlier volumes already housed there, but also included folios in the Korean Decimal system, and select LC-classed Chinese language folios of old newspaper runs. Records have been updated in CLIO to indicate the location as Prentis--East Asian for these items. As part of the most recent move, all 73,585 LC-classed CJK bound serial volumes at Prentis have been shifted and are in the process of being shelfread.

East Asian items shelved off-site may be borrowed directly from Prentis Hall, or can be requested to be delivered to Starr Library by filling out a request form at the circulation desk. Questions about Prentis--East Asian items should be directed to Alex Brown (arb5@columbia.edu) who can be reached at 854-2627.

DEPOSITORY PLANNING

In spite of the move of thousands of volumes to Prentis over the summer, our growth space is still quite limited for the approximately 15,000 volumes added to our collection each year. The Libraries' plan is for a off-site storage facility on the model of the Harvard Depository to open with the new millennium. It is a cooperative venture with the New York Public Library, and will be located in the Bronx. For your information, Starr will be showing a video tape about the kind of facility being planned. Please plan to come to the Kress Seminar Room on Friday, October 31. We will show the short video every hour on the hour from 10:00 am until the last showing at 4:00 pm. Candy corn will be served.

MOLD CRISIS

On a warm day in September, a failure in the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system resulted in a spike of very high humidity on the 100-level of our old stacks. The humidity unfortunately provided excellent conditions for the growth of mold. Fortunately, it was discovered promptly. In order to contain the spread of the mold, the room was closed off, and in order to save the books, the room was thoroughly cleaned and disinfected by the Restoration Company, which specializes in such cleanup work. Every surface in the room (shelves, walls, floor, and ceiling), and every volume shelved there, was vacuumed and hand cleaned with a fungicide to remove mold and mold spores. The folios on the north and east walls of room 108 were cleaned as well. Monitoring of the climate control equipment has increased.

EXHIBITIONS

We will be mounting an exhibition on Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724) in late October. The exhibition will contain books, papers, prints, and artifacts by, about, and related to Chikamatsu and his work. This exhibition is planned in conjunction with the International Chikamatsu Symposium organized by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture.

Currently still on display in our main reading room is a small selection of Starr's art properties. These items are examples of non-print donations to our collection. Included are a collection of Yuan period (1279-1368) Nestorian crosses which were used as seals or identifying insignia, a pair of official Manchu (1644-1912) seals, a jade artifact (cicada), a Ming period (1368-1644) bronze mirror, an accordion-shape book or Shu depicting fourteen Lohan (bringers of Buddhism to China), a traditional Tibetan new year's greeting in the form of a handmade illuminated manuscript, and a Sino-Tibetan silk Thanka with embroidery. And still on display in our Rare Book reading room is an exhibition of Abe Kobo books and papers. If you have not yet had an opportunity to view these displays, make sure to do so soon before they are removed to make room for the Chikamatsu exhibition.

CLIO-PLUS AND LIBRARYWEB

As is characteristic of electronic information sources, changes are constantly taking place in the provision of access to these sources; some good, others not so attractive. We will keep you informed of any changes that we feel are of particular importance to your needs. At this point, there are two changes that we would like you to be aware of.

As of October 1, 1997, Worldcat, the First Search interface to the OCLC database, is available on both CLIO-Plus, where you will find it under the "Remote Catalogs" menu selection, and on LibraryWeb (or LWeb). At the same time "Classic" RLIN has been removed from CLIO-Plus. The RLIN database remains available in the Eureka interface. If you need assistance in learning to use these databases, feel free to come to the Reference Desk any weekday afternoon. We will be happy to help you. Keep in mind that CLIO and our card catalogs (in that order) remain your primary resource for information on local holdings.

A more problematic development, at least for the time being, is that many database providers are in the process of converting their products to a Windows-based environment. As CLIO-Plus is not equipped to handle this format, these databases are gradually being moved to LWeb instead. This has affected accessibility to databases (such as Uncover) of use to our public. We hope to be able, in the near future, to install WWW-capable terminals in Starr to resolve this problem. In the meantime we advise you to use Cnet terminals elsewhere on campus; in Kent Hall the nearest ones are on the second floor (between the Bursar's office and the Registrar's office), and on the fourth floor (near the elevator). Those of you who own WWW-capable computers are advised to purchase an AcIS communication software package, which (among other functions) provides a direct Cnet connection.

ZASSHI KIJI SAKUIN ON LINE

Beginning this September, we are subscribing to the online version of Zasshi kiji sakuin through a commercial vendor, Nichigai Associates, at the URL http://web.nichigai.co.jp/. While the original offering by the National Diet Library had been prohibitively expensive, the commercial service is within our budget, as well as easy to use. We have a site license and the database is available to all Columbia faculty and students. However, until we have solved gateway problems on the Web, which will check identification automatically, you must obtain the ID and password from the Japanese Studies Librarian, Yasuko Makino (reached at 854-1506, or at makino@columbia.edu). Please remember, this site license is for Columbia ID holders only!

REFERENCE DESK SCHEDULE

Below is the Reference Desk schedule for this fall semester. It should be helpful in planning your visits to the library if you want to speak to a particular reference librarian. The initials indicate which librarian is on duty at which hour.

Note: RKB = Ria Koopmans-de Bruijn; HKL = HyoKyoung "HK" Lee; FL = Frances LaFleur; YM = Yasuko Makino.