East Asian collections in North American Libraries: some recent developments in cooperation

Abstract

In a paper presented at the 28th International Congress of Orientalists held in 1971, I attempted to describe the growth of Orientalist collections in the United States during the post-World War II period in the context of the overall development of area studies programs relating to Asia and the Middle East. In the present paper, I have taken a much more limited compass, concentrating on recent developments affecting East Asian collections in North American libraries. In the earlier paper, I characterized the development of area studies and library resources in the U. S. as one of the "exuberant growth" with unusual largesse in funding available from private foundations, the federal government, and individual universities. By the early 1970s, however, it was becoming apparent that such growth could not be sustained indefinitely , and that increasingly librarians would have to rely on more finely tuned cooperative programs in order to meet the demands being placed upon them by the scholarly community. This has indeed proved to be the case, and it is the purpose of this paper to trace some of t he major developments in two areas--resource sharing and national bibliographic controls--that reflect a new willingness to undertake cooperative projects offering rational and economic solutions to everyday problems faced by librarians at the local level.