Library Newsletter Issue 14

Issue 14

Nov 2022

Editor’s note

Here comes autumn, a season of harvesting for farmers. The same goes for HKBU Library! Librarians and library staff have invested time and efforts in the past year to create new spaces and projects, to hunt for new collections, and to make contributions to the information field.

While the Trans-disciplinary discovery commons in Level 2 of the Main Library has just been open for over a month, the next space improvement project has already been lined up. Levels 6 and 7 will soon undergo major renovation next year. Apart from upgrading the Library’s space, work has also been done in the digital world. A new digital scholarship project and an eJournal have been added to the Library’s digital collection. We don’t just create, we collect as well! If you have been following our social media (Instagram, Facebook, or WeChat), you would have noticed our Special Collections & Archives are experts in treasure-hunting rare materials. In this issue, you will see another recent purchase! Librarians’ work goes beyond the University community too. The Chinese Medicine Library has been involved in the formulation of a China national standard for establishing traditional Chinese medicine thesauri.

I hope you enjoy this new issue!

Maggie Wong
Information Services Librarian

Trans-disciplinary discovery commons

The Trans-disciplinary discovery commons (Tddc) in the Main Library has opened since late October 2022, we hope you enjoy the new space! The dimmed light and cozy furniture have attracted many students chilling out on the bean bags or working on their laptops with friends. You can also find magazines and books around the short shelves to read at your leisure. Since its opening, two events have already taken place in Tddc. They are the 50th Book Culture Club event and the Cultural Literacy Programme’s movie screening. Stay tuned for the next event and the new technology upcoming in Tddc!

Maggie Wong
Information Services Librarian

Upcoming renovation works in the Main Library

In June 2023, a major renovation project is due to begin on Levels 6 and 7 of the Main Library. The exact length of the works is not yet confirmed, but I expect that these floors will not be accessible for most of the 2023/24 academic year.

As many readers will be aware, these two floors are where we store a large percentage of our print collection. These books will be removed during the renovation. We will try to keep the most heavily used titles in the Library. However, due to extremely limited space, the bulk of the collection will need to be placed in non-pageable storage off-site. Titles will not be accessible and, since Levels 6 and 7 will have a lower storage capacity after renovation, not all of them will return to the collection.

We recognize that this will be a significant disruption in access to the physical collection, which is why I want to let the HKBU community know about it as early as possible. Here are some of the actions we plan to take to mitigate the impact as far as possible:

• Reclassification of heavily used titles for reshelving on Levels 4 and 5.
• Placing of other high-use items in retrievable storage on Level 1.
• Subscription/purchase of e-versions of some books moved into storage.

Despite the above measures, the number of volumes available to the HKBU community will be greatly reduced. Therefore, I also suggest that students and faculty take advantage of our generous loan policies to borrow any and all titles that they may have a need for in the coming 18 months.

While recognizing the impact on the University community, I am also mindful of the tremendous amount of work and pressure this puts on to my Library colleagues. The organization and logistics of this project are incredibly complex. I must express my sincere thanks to them for working towards intensive deadlines.

I am confident that these efforts will be worth the investment. The upper floors of the Main Library are overdue for an overhaul, as these spaces are essentially unchanged from when the building opened in the mid-1990s. By providing more and higher quality study space for our students, this renovation will inaugurate the next phase of the University Library’s development.

Christopher Chan
University Librarian

New Digital Scholarship Project – Resounding the Scores: Music Office Chinese Ensemble Music Collection

Digital Initiatives & Research Cluster has completed a new Digital Scholarship Grant website “Resounding the Scores – Music Office Chinese Ensemble Music Collection”, which features a collection of parts and full scores of 51 pieces of Chinese instrumental ensemble music preserved in the Music Office (MO) of the Hong Kong Government’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD).

The scores include music of erhu maestro Tong Leung-Tak (湯良德) alongside the compositions and arrangements of a few other musicians that served MO’s education and performance needs in the past four decades. On top of archiving, preserving, and sharing this collection for research and performance purposes, this project sets out to promote Chinese music by providing a short biography of Tong, a short description of each piece in this collection, an introduction to Chinese instrumental ensemble music, and a guide to the classification of Chinese instruments. This project also advocates the ‘resounding’ of this collection by offering the live recording of three of Tong’s most popular pieces performed by the Hong Kong Youth Chinese Orchestra (HKYCO) in January 2022 with MO’s coordination. 

Eric Chow
Digital Scholarship Manager

Sino-Humanitas (人文中國學報) newly added to the eJournals@HKBU collection

Sino-Humanitas (人文中國學報), founded by faculty members of several HKBU departments, was first published in 1995. The journal aims to promote humanities research in China and enhance the international status of academic articles written in the Chinese language. It has recently migrated from offline to the online platform, Open Journal System (OJS), with the support of the ejournals@HKBU services offered by the University Library.

As part of the Digital Initiatives and Research Services, ejournals@HKBU is a free hosting service to assist faculty and research centres to publish open-access journals. Through this service, scholarly articles from Sino-Humanitas become freely accessible online and welcome a wider readership. Permanent links of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) together with Creative Commons License are also assigned to published contents of the journal to enhance searching and sharing of the research outputs.  

Visit the newly launched journal website to learn more about a variety of Chinese humanities topics!

If you’re interested in setting up a new open-access journal or transferring an existing journal to HKBU’s OJS platform, contact Katie Cheng, Officer (Open Access), at ckykatie@hkbu.edu.hk to discuss your needs.

Katie Cheng
Officer (Open Access)

Missionaries’ letters from the 1800s to the early 1900s

Recently the Library’s Special Collections and Archives purchased several letters from missionaries to China. They span 60-odd years and were written by missionaries from various denominations working in different parts of China: 

• Jennie Jones, from the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, from Fujian in 1920 
• William Boone, the first Anglican bishop of China and Japan (his real title!) based in Xiamen, written from New York in 1859 
• Isaac Pierson, American missionary in Baoding Fu (now Hebei Province) dated 1879 
• Elizabeth Neal, with three handwritten letters sent to her parents in 1888 from Shandong Province

These letters are a welcomed addition to the Archives on the History of Christianity in China, a major special collection in the Library.

Foreign missionaries were most active in China from the 1820s to the 1950s. These years were also the years when China was forced to open up, and transformed from a 2,000-year-old empire to a modern state. The changes were enormous and unprecedented, and the arrival of foreign missionaries made a huge impact when they preached Christianity and introduced ideas, knowledge, and technologies from the west. On a personal level, we can see among these letters how the missionaries adapted to life in China and worked in schools and hospitals while building churches and preaching. These letters are often meant for the audience in their homeland, to let them know about missionary activities in China and to solicit support and funding.

Purchasing letters like these is more by chance than by design. Letters do not easily survive the years after they were written, printed, sent or received. The letters here are all purchased from antiquarian booksellers who are good friends of special collection librarians around the world. Nowadays letters for purchase are very rare, not because they haven’t survived, but because they are not physical anymore!

Wan Yu WONG
Special Collections and Archives Librarian

China National Standard on Traditional Chinese Medicine Thesauri

Announced by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the National Standardization Administration of China on 11 October 2021, the China National Standard “Guideline for establishment and development of traditional Chinese medicine thesauri” (GB/T 40670-2021) has been approved and takes effect from that day. This China national standard will help and guide the construction and development of thesauri on Chinese Medicine and other traditional medicine as well as other complementary medicine.

The Chinese Medicine Library (CML) has participated in the formulation of this China national standard and was designated to be responsible for the promotion of the standard. In October 2022, CML completed a promotional video about the interpretation of the national standard and provided the video for two online conferences.

Positive messages have been received from the participants of these events, indicating the possibility of potential cooperation. CML will continue to make efforts to promote the National Standard in the future.

Fun facts about thesaurus and its guideline

Thesaurus is a normative representation of natural language. It is a “controlled and structured vocabulary in which concepts are represented by terms, organized so that relationships between concepts are made explicit, and preferred terms are accompanied by lead-in entries for synonyms or quasi-synonyms”( ISO 25964). A large number of thesauri have been compiled in most subjects and are still being compiled today. Thesaurus is one of the most used knowledge organization tools. In the Internet age, the thesaurus has important applications in semantic reasoning, knowledge mining, intelligent retrieval, machine translation, visualization, and other fields, highlighting the research value of thesaurus. 

The history of information retrieval thesauri can be traced back to the 1950s. The first thesaurus for information retrieval was developed in 1959 at E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Company. Since the first international standard for the construction of monolingual thesauri was carried out in 1974, several thesaurus construction standards have been developed during the past decades, including international, British, UNISIST, U.S., and China standards, etc. All these thesaurus construction standards can provide norms and guidelines for the construction of related subject thesauri and advance the usage of a thesaurus.

David Su
Chinese Medicine Librarian

Last updated: 05 March 2025