Director of C.V. Starr East Asian Library on Global Collaboration

Columbia University’s C.V. Starr East Asian Library sets itself apart as the home of one of the major collections for the study of East Asia in the United States. Possessing over one million volumes of rich materials of various kinds and languages, the library is crucial to the pursuit of rigorous intellectual inquiry and provides a place for students and scholars to satisfy their curiosity about all things Chinese.

July 03, 2015

Columbia University’s C.V. Starr East Asian Library sets itself apart as the home of one of the major collections for the study of East Asia in the United States. Possessing over one million volumes of rich materials of various kinds and languages, the library is crucial to the pursuit of rigorous intellectual inquiry and provides a place for students and scholars to satisfy their curiosity about all things Chinese. On June 16, Director of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library Mr. Jim Cheng delivered a talk on current projects being undertaken by the library, highlighting the extensive collaboration that such efforts require.

Mr. Cheng elaborated upon five existing projects that the library is currently engaged in to further enrich its already expansive Chinese collection. The digitization of important materials figures prominently in the library’s activities and is central to three particular projects: the Digitization and Exchange Project of Chinese materials during the Minguo period (1911-1949) with the China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL), the Digitization of Wellington Koo’s Papers with the Modern History Institute and the Shanghai Library, and the Digitizing and publishing of unique materials with the Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House.

Two other major projects, the Cornelius Vander Starr Archival Digitization project with Beijing Superstar Technology and a collaborative project with the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, have also been successful with the latter organizing a Chinese Film and Culture Festival/Symposium in 2011.

All of the projects that the C.V. Starr East Asian Library has been engaged in have produced important and unique results that will undeniably be important for future scholarship and historical preservation. For example, in partnership with Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library has acquired and digitized a document surveying Chinese laborers in Cuba, the only known copy in the world and the first such Chinese government record published at the end of the 19th century. Another example can be found in the digitization of over one thousand copies of the newspaper ‘Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury’ through the Cornelius Vander Starr Archival Digitization project with Beijing Superstar Technology.

Projects undertaken by the C.V. Starr East Asian Library are not independent projects conducted by Jim Cheng and his team alone, but instead involve multiple partners across national borders and industries. The ‘global collaboration” Cheng speaks of allows for the highest quality in the process of digitization, and increases the scope and scale of the dissemination of culturally rich and intellectually valuable materials. The digital age has rendered access to digital materials a possibility on a global scale, and the process of producing that digital material, of digitizing and archiving, has also benefited tremendously from this cross-national collaboration.

(Photo contributed by Jing Liong; Edited by Eyra Xiong)