LibraryTechtonics

My flight finally landed in Boston’s Logan Airport at about 7:30a EST this morning, after a 1.25 hour delay last night in San Francisco (due to plane unavailability, and the flurry of passenger reassignments from a cancelled American Airlined flight earlier in the day). Despite the fact that I took a Unisom with a perfect vanilla milkshake that really hit the spot, and sleeping through the whole flight, I’m entirely too tired.

I had plans for today. Stay awake to write posts and Flickr photos and check email. Fight jetlag with every fiber of my being. Reset my circadian clock to sleep at night and be refreshed to head to PLA at the Hynes bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the AM. Alas, I have been defeated, and slept quite a bit today. I s’pose the 13 hour flight from Hong Kong to SFO didn’t help that much, either.

I’ll see what I can get up on the blog and the photostream, but whatever I don’t post from my China trip tonight will have to wait until after PLA, since I don’t want to futz with both at the same time. This might be considered cheating, but I’m going to date the posts for their actually date of occurence, so that they will appear in the proper order in the archive.

Many thanks to Steve at See Also, host of the most recent Carnival of Infosciences, for the pointer!

Sorry to be so out-of-touch for so many days. While access was available in the Business Centre of the Horizon Hotel in Kunming, the schedule was aggressively busy and exhausting, so I’ve decided to try to post the rest of my notes between today, tomorrow, and next week (you know, after PLA).

I have once again accepted the generous invitation of my friend Colby’s parents, Brian and Martha, to wait out my layover in their home in Hillsborough (about 10 mins away from SFO). I tried to fly standby to catch an earlier flight, but due to another cancelled flight this morning getting home today will be impossible, so I’ll be heading home on my original red-eye flight to Boston this evening.

Just as well, it’ll be interesting to contribute to the Flickr annual “Day in the life of…” (DILO) event, documenting my travel home (while I may not participate in the consensed-upon-yet-optional theme, it’ll still be interesting).

I’m slowly catching up on email, so bear with me if you don’t hear from me for a few days. And if you’ll be at PLA and want to catch up, let me know.

The library here at Yunnan University is the oldest academic library in Yunnan province, founded in 1923. The collection houses 100,000,000 items in Chinese and other languages, 16,200 volumes of ancient docments, and 600,000 periodicals. In 1993, the library automation network was established, and they have access to many Chinese and other information databases, freely available to faculty, and students on campus and via remote access. They are also open to everyone in the city of Kunming, but there is a charge to non-students.

They also have a multifunction reading room containing 112 multimedia networked computers, as well as free wifi, as you all now know ;). A new campus library is currently under construction and should be finished by this August.

After the introductory remarks, one of our delegates gave a presentation on information literacy in academic libraries, with emphasis on knowing your audience and how your patrons best learn, and tailoring information literacy and bibliographic instruction lessons to meet the needs of your constituency. This includes using technology (or not), depending on how people learn best.

Another delegate made a presentation of a the ALA Intellectual Freedom Manual, and made an excellent presentation of how important intellectual freedom is to the basis of the information economy, and how librarians are essential to the development progressive society (I have more comments on this that I’ll post later). Since Dr. Chao, the president of the university, made mention of how the university wishes to better embrace the information economy, this presentation was quite appropriate and helpful, and not at all political, making it comfortable for everyone.

As it turns out, American and Chinese academic libraries have many of the same issues. Chinese libraries are moving towards implementing more technology rather than hiring more librarians, and when hiring, they prefer to hire part-time instead of full-time librarians. Bringing students into the library is also an issue, although it seems that the relationship building between students and librarians in China is more aggressive. One Chinese librarian mentioned that in addition to providing phone, email, BI sessions in classes, and in-person support, librarians have given students personal cell phone numbers so that they can call for help whether they are here at school, at home during break (many students are from other provinces), or even travelling abroad.

Despite this relationship building, it is still difficult to bring in students. Delegates have shared stories of how adding coffee shops to libraries, making friends with professors which lead to better professional relationships and collaboration, and faculty professional development days where library services are highlighted have helped a great deal to inform faculty and staff of available resources.

In China, library and information science is an undergraduate program, although there are masters and doctoral programs as well. It seems that they approach library science from the opposite direction we do academically, where in America librarians either come to librarianship as a second career, or after another masters, so a big question was how American libraries train reference librarians to maximize service quality in a minimum period of time when serving such a broad range of academic needs. As librarians know, training reference librarians isn’t a descrete task, it’s more of an art cultivated over time through experience. Academic libraries often require a masters in a specialization, but otherwise, there isn’t anything formal. We shared our experiences with on-the-job training, self study, mentorship training, and classes through consortia. I think I would have added learning from each other through conferences, networking, and pre-conference training sessions, but there wasn’t enough time.

As with Beijing Normal University Library, we’re finding more and more that at least the academic libraries in American and in China have many similar service issues. We haven’t talked about technology and integration issues as much as I’d like (RFID came up at the end of this meeting, which is totally not enough time to discuss something as controversial and multifaceted).

Off to lunch, then to the provincial library.

I’m currently sitting in a meeting in the Yunan University Library in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province where we’ll spend the remainder of our trip. Just for kicks, I enabled the wifi on Carol’s laptop to see if I could get a connection, and I did, so I’m taking this quick opportunity to post. Perhaps I can post a quick summary of this current meeting before we leave the library. Go go gadget free university wifi!

The delegation hopped a 3-hour flight from Beijing to Kunming yesterday morning. We were finally settled into our hotel around 3:30P or so, then spent some time walking around Kunming before dinner at a local famous restaurant.

Kunming is *beautiful*. There just aren’t enough words to describe it. Even just sitting in a conference room at Yunnan University Library, warm, spring sunlight streams through a wall of windows, and you can see the green grass, budding trees, and beautiful flowers everywhere. I’m jealous of the students and staff here!

We have 2 professional meetings today, the current one at Yunnan University Library, and an afternoon meeting at Yunnan Provincial Library, which is the local version of a public library.

Back to the meeting…

This morning our delegation headed out for a cultural program day at about 8:00am, with our first stop at the Forbidden City in the exact center of Beijing.

As we walked through parts of the city selected by our National Guide Tony (the whole complex is gigantic, and would take days to explore fully), he offered us many great nuggets of historical and architectural information. He even recommended From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi as further reading about the last emperor of China, and an interesting read on the history of China.

As topics came and went, I found myself thinking of the many content-based items I’d consumed in the past that related to Chinese culture and history, as well as the Forbidden City. Here’s the quick list I came up with:

* The Last Emporer: A biographical account of the last emporer of China, Puyi. He lived there, you know.
* Raise the Red Lantern: As we walked through the courtyard of the concubines’ rooms, Tony spoke of how concumbines were in a constant war and competition with each other for the favors of one master, the emporer. While not nearly the same time period as the reign of the last emporer, Raise the Red Lantern is still a decent fictional account of how crazy concubine life was.

* Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: The Empress Dowager was the single most powerful woman in China for about 48 years, recruiting one child emporer after another as puppets to allow her to rule the country. Women didn’t normally have such power, and in a completely blatent and ineffective effort at making her influence less obvious, she set up a screen that hung between her and the baby emporers to give the illusion that she wasn’t there. Despite her influence, she was limited in her power. Men constantly tried to put women in their place, and one way to limit women’s power and influence was to bind their feet. Long story long, this book is a fictional story centered around foot binding for women in China.