Unique Chinese collections rediscovered
Library transliteration project uncovers valuable Chinese research material
The Libraries’ are working on a project to catalogue approximately 6,000 books within our Chinese collections. This will provide quality bibliographic records for texts in Chinese Main Collections, so they can be discovered and used for research and teaching.
These records, mostly 20th-century texts, were previously undiscoverable on Library Search. Modern Chinese script is transliterated into English using a system called Pinyin, but the records for these items were in the outdated Wade-Giles format or did not even include the original Chinese script at all. This means they were lost to a core group of our academic community.
To assess these items, Jing Shier, Metadata and Discovery Coordinator for the Libraries Content and Discovery team, carried out a benchmarking exercise comparing 100 random titles against four UK and three international institutions with East Asian Studies departments.
These were the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Nottingham, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Stanford University, Yale and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Over half of the titles benchmarked were not represented anywhere else within the four UK institutions. Our closest matching institution was Yale. This means that the University of Leeds holds valuable research materials in Chinese that are extremely difficult to find in the UK.
A faculty member from East Asian Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Culture reviewed the items, saying “Most of the ones I looked at have some research value, including one title for myself. I happened to be chatting to a colleague about it afterwards, and she too thought the selection sounded useful.”
Access and Acquisitions Manager for Metadata and Discovery Alison Hazelar said of the project, “We hope to provide better visibility and access to Chinese materials within our collections to aid research and teaching, so that our resources better reflect our user community and increase the sense of belonging for our international students.”
The University of Leeds Libraries continues to be committed to diversifying our collections and playing a central role in the institutional aim of decolonising the curriculum.
