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The Columbia Libraries will soon be enhancing their traditional strengths in two key areas: East Asian studies and human rights.
The C.V. Starr East Asian Library is making more of its extraordinary collections available online, to the benefit of scholars and other interested people who are unable to visit its collections in person.
With the help of a grant from the Freeman Foundation, Starr Library will be creating a searchable online database of images from its distinctive Barbara C. Adachi Japanese Puppet Theater Collection, which features rare and original materials related to the revival of bunraku, a 17th-century form of puppet theater, in postwar Japan. The collection consists of more than 12,500 slides and nearly 7,000 black-and-white photos, as well as theater programs, texts and audio recordings.
According to Starr Library director Amy V. Heinrich, the digitization project is intended to make the collection "a public as well as a library resource."
For more information on the project, visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2005/2005-12
-01.freeman_funds_acachi.html.
In addition, the Libraries have launched a new Web site for Ling long, a Chinese women's magazine of the 1930s that provides a unique glimpse into the cultural life of Republican-era Shanghai. An initiative of Columbia Libraries' Digital Program, the site, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/linglong/, offers significant new content, such as essays filling in the historical and cultural background to appreciate the magazine's collection of articles on topics such as film, furniture, fashion, marriage, and advice on how to be "the girl of today."
We can expect to see more initiatives of this kind in future now that the Starr Library has answered a $1.5 million dollar grant from the Starr Foundation by raising $2.1 million of its own, much of which came from library users. The Starr grant is directed toward improvements to the Library's physical infrastructure, additions to its Korean and Tibetan collections, and further digitization of its holdings. For more information on this grant, visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2005/2005-12-
02.starr_meets_challenge.html.
Finally, Columbia's library system recently announced that its Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research (CHRDR), part of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, will become the official repository for Amnesty International USA's archive of country and mission reports, case files and oral histories, as well as photographs, videos, DVDs, posters, banners, T-shirts and newspaper clippings. CHRDR already houses the archives of Human Rights Watch and several other human rights organizations. Additional information on this project is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2005/2005-11-29.aiusa_dhrdr.html.
Said University Librarian James Neal, "Columbia is one of the world's leading centers for human rights research and education, and it is appropriate to develop through its libraries a strong human rights archive program." |
