Building A Better Chinese Collection For The Library Of Congress
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Building a Better Chinese Collection for the Library of Congress
Author: Chi Wang
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2012-07-02
In this collection of essays written by the former head of the Library of Congress Chinese Collection, Chi Wang chronicles the modest beginnings of the Chinese Collection at the Library of Congress and his crusade to transform it into the largest collection and Chinese cultural presence outside Asia. For anyone who has ever wondered what goes on inside the marble walls of one of the country’s oldest federal institutions, Wang relates an insider’s account of the major milestones and changes to the administration of the Collection over the years. Readers will be surprised not only to learn about some of the rare and priceless books that have found their way to the Library of Congress but also by the candor with which Wang shares his story about serving under three different Librarians of Congress, each with a different mandate and mark they wanted to leave behind. Building a Better Chinese Collection for the Library of Congress has value as American library history but also serves as a useful introduction to Chinese historical archives and libraries. Select writings discuss publication and personnel exchanges with Chinese academic libraries, Chinese character encoding and library automation, and publishing activities in China.
The Library of Congress
"This is the first comprehensive history of the Library of Congress that is not merely about one aspect or another-e.g., buildings, ornamentation, collections, timeline highlights. Jane Aikin engages deeply with a wealth of primary and secondary sources to weave a narrative of the individuals, events, and controversies that have shaped this venerable institution. Drawing millions of visitors a year, the Library serves as the research arm of Congress, the home of the U.S. Copyright Office, and as a public forum for artistic and literary culture. Never designated by law as the national library of the United States, it nonetheless occupies that place in the national imagination. This history of 13 male Librarians culminates in 2016 with the swearing in of Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American Librarian of Congress. The narrative is punctuated by stories of key donors and pivotal performances by poets, authors, and celebrities"--
Kingdom of Characters
A PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the process What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalized, digital world. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script - and the value-system it represents - to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences. With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations.