New Microfilm Collection of Published Chinese Materials From the 1930s and 1940s

Research Note: New Microfilm Collection of Published Chinese Materials From the 1930s and 1940s by Edward A. McCord The culmination of an extraordinary microfilming project will now pro .. vide easy access to a rich and diverse collection of Chinese materials, totaling 3,760 titles, published between the years 1932 and 1945. This project originated with a 1991 panel sponsored by the Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People's Republic of China that was dedi .. cated to increasing access to materials in Chinese libraries and improving coop .. eration between Chinese and foreign libraries. The result of this panel· was a proposal for a collaborative microfilming project that would help Chinese Ii.. braries preserve and catalog their materials while at the same time making them more accessible to scholars outside of China. A decision ·was made to focus on materials from the Resistance War period (1937-1945), first because materials from this period were generally printed on poor quality paper, and thus in great need of preservation, and second because materials from this period are rela .. tively under ..represented in libraries outside China. The project was initiated by generous grants from the National Endow .. ment for the Humanities and the Luce Foundation, and was administered through the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China. The Chongqing Mu .. nicipal Library was originally chosen as the Chinese partner for the project, because it has the richest collection in China of materials from the Resistance War period. Unfortunately, immediately before microfilming was to begin in late 1994, the library made demands that would have cut the total number of pages to be reproduced by one..half. Rather than accepting this reduction in the scope of the project, the project was shifted to Fudan University. Since the collection of the Fudan University Library was not as large as Chongqing's for the 19371945 period, the beginning date for materials to be included in the project was moved back to 1932. Microfilming of the books was completed in 1997, and microfilms may now be either purchased or borrowed from the Center for Re.. search Libraries. Additional funding from the National Endowment for the Hu.. manities also supported the cataloging and the creation of an on..line biblio .. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. XXIV, No.2 (April 1999): 107-110 108 Twentieth-Century China graphic record of the collection, which is again available (as of December 1998) through the internet site of the Center for Research Libraries. The quality and usefulness of the final product owes much to a careful selection process. This process began with an initial review of photocopies of over 27,000 catalog cards from the Chongqing Library. A reduced list was created by eliminating certain categories of materials seen has having less intrinsic value to scholars, such as translations of foreign literature, math and science books, reprinted Chinese classics, and textbooks. A group of scholars from a range of disciplines was then asked to identify the titles from the remaining list that they believed would be of greatest scholarly interest in their fields. The result was a list of approximately 4,000 titles. When the project was moved to Fudan, all materials on the Chongqing list that were also held by the Fudan library were retained, and a second selection process was initiated to identify other titles from the Fudan collection to replace items not held in common by the two libraries. The goal of the selection process was not simply to choose important titles, but titles that were not generally available in the United States. Therefore, the final list was crosschecked against the online records of U. S. libraries to eliminate titles already held in reprint or microfilm form by U. S. libraries. In a very few cases, a match was found with a printed book, but the title remained in the film list so that it could be preserved. The reliance on online records also means that there may be some additional duplication of materials in collections which have not yet completed electronic cataloguing. (The most obvious example would be the Hoover Library collection on this period at Stanford University). Nonetheless , since all materials from the microfilm project can be searched online, these...