Hi everyone, welcome to the Asian Language Collections Learning webinar.

My name is Bing.

I'm a reference librarian and coordinator of Asian collections in the reader services team here at the National Library.

I'm joined by my colleague, Rika who is also a reference librarian here.

She has a wealth of experience working with our Asian language collections and in particular the Japanese collection.

We would like to start by acknowledging Australian First Nations peoples.

The First Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and gives respects to the elders past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Today, we are going to talk about the Library's amazing Asian language collections.

We will start by giving you an overview of the Asian collections and explain to you what is available and after that we will show you how to find and access them

Today's session is of particular interest to those of you who are interested in published works of Asian countries and the Library's rich holding of the Asian language publications created by Australian Asian communities here in Australia.

So firstly, let's begin with a brief overview of our Asian language collections.

Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the library took small interest in the documentary heritage of Asian countries. In the 1950s, the importance of understanding its Asian neighbours and Asian studies was gradually recognised.

It was under Sir Harold White, Australia's first National Librarian that systematic collecting of publications from and about Asia began.

During the 1960s and 70s, a number of privately formed collections relating to Asia work wired.

Among them, there were the library of the famous French orientalist, George Coedès, on the history and culture of Indochina, the Braga collection of over 7000 books and conflict on the Portuguese in Asia.

The Beyer collection on the Philippines, which contains about 3000 items and the rich holdings of the London Missionary Society collection in Chinese language, which includes rare and original items of China's Taiping rebellion in the mid 18th century to name just a few.

These formed collections add valuable retrospective holdings to our Asian collections.

On the other hand, we have purchased contemporary research material from and about Asia from publishers and book dealers.

Today, the Library houses the largest resource on Asia in Australia with holdings of over half a million volumes.

The Asian collections emphasise East and Southeast Asia.

Our script language collections include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and Burmese collections.

We collect books, journals, magazines, government publications, newspapers, maps, pictures, ephemera and many other materials.

We also subscribe to some online databases.

The fact that the Asian collections have only been developed since the 1950s has partly dictated the nature of these collections.

The strength of the collections is in contemporary materials from the 19th century onwards, with emphasis on the social sciences.

The subject of the modern history, politics and government current affairs, society, and culture are well covered.

Our holdings of modern history in Asia cover most of the significant times and events.

If you'd like to learn about Meiji Restoration, the rise of the Chinese communists, the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the impact of the Cold War in Asia; material to support your interest is extensive.

Our contemporary holdings are as rich.

The collection offers abundant resources to support exploration of topics such as North-South Korean relations, the political movements in Thailand, Korean pop culture, The LGBTQ and gender studies in Japan, Indigenous people in Taiwan, Economic development, Government policies, Social movements and arts in Asian countries.

Then this goes on.

One of the Library's collecting priorities is Australian material.

We hold a significant collection of publications about Australia and by Australian authors published in these Asian countries.

With contemporary material being the main focus, we also have wonderful old and rare items in the collections.

An example is now a beautiful Japanese woodblock print collection.

We have hundreds of the prints published in the 19th and early 20th century in Japan.

Most of them are digitised and made available via Trove.

I'd like to show you this print which is called: Shinasadame kaika no hana

This was printed in 1879.

The woodblock prints from the late 19th century shows the rapid social changes in Japan.

This may look like a scene from a kabuki play, but it's not.

This print depicts people comparing traditional Japanese goods with those newly introduced after the opening of this country as if they were kabuki actors.

Look at the two men in the middle.

One of them is wearing a traditional Cape.

The other is wearing a Victorian style coat.

Like them, we can see a traditional sandal and a shoe.

A Japanese style umbrella and Western style one

This man is holding new banknotes in one hand and a bag of a Edo era silver coins in the other.

We know from this print that the end of the 19th century was a time of mixing the traditional with new from the West.

The Library's woodblock print collection is an invaluable resource for the study of art as well as social sciences.

The Library not only holds a wonderful collection of material collected from these Asian countries.

We have also been collecting material documenting the lives and activities of Asian communities here in Australia for decades.

The legal deposit requirement under the Copyright Act 1968 has also enabled Library to collect a good collection of published works in Asian languages, such as newspapers, magazines, community newsletters, reports, yearbooks and a lot more.

Take out the Chinese language newspapers, for example. We hold over 100 Chinese Australian newspapers published across different states and territories in Australia from the earliest ones started in the 1850s to many current titles.

An example of the early Chinese newspaper is this one.

A supplement to Chinese Australian Herald.

This broadsheets was published in 1897 with an illustration of the Diamond Jubilee Charity Carnival which was held in honour of Queen Victoria at the Sydney Agricultural Grounds.

A special feature of that carnival was the Chinese procession. About 600 Chinese participated in this event. They came from all parts of Sydney and suburbs.

Through this picture, we could imagine the liveliness of this scene.

They wore celestial costumes borrowed from the Chinese community at Bendigo.

At the head of the procession, there was a huge dragon, 150 feet long, which needed 80 Chinese people to carry.

There were also lion danc,e the Emperor's carriages, the Chinese flags and banners.

These broadsheets vividly documents his first time in the colony of New South Wales that such a Chinese display had taken place.

We also have many current newspapers such as the Australian Chinese Daily, the Chinese Melbourne Daily and the Australian Chinese Times.

They, all together, provide a great array of information about the individual and collective lives of Chinese people in Australia.

So, no matter if you are a student of Asian studies, migrants from Asia who would like to read books in your languages, descendant of Asian migrants interested in discovering family history stories, or if you are just curious about Asia; there's something for you in this collection.

We have talked you through a broad overview of what is in the Asian language collection and some example of the collection highlights.

This takes us to our next point.

How to find and access these materials.

Let's bring up the library homepage: N - L - A dot G - O - V dot A - U

Before jumping over to our catalogue search, I would suggest you apply for National Library card if you haven't got one.

To get a library card is very simple.

You scroll down a little bit and click the get a library card just below the catalogue search.

Getting a library card is free.

You don't need a library card to search our catalogue, but you will need to log in with your library card to request items or access our subscribed databases from home.

If you can't make it to the Library, you can choose to have the card posted to you.

Let's go back to the home page from here.

This is our catalogue search.

Most of the collections are discoverable by our online catalogue.

You can use this search box to start your search or you can click on this catalogue button on the right to go straight to the catalogue page.

Our catalogue allows you to search using English, Asian scripts and Romanised form.

The searching methods are similar, though, you search by keyword, subject of interest, title, publication or name of author.

The best way is to start with the more general term and then you can refine result in a variety of different ways.

Our example today is Chinese history.

You can start off type in Chinese history or history China here in the search bar.

After clicking the "find" button, you'll be able to see a list of catalogue records relating to the keyword.

On the right hand side of the page there are a few limiters which can be used to narrow search.

As you can see, we have items of different formats.

You can click on the "more" to expand the list.

So our history of China we hold resources in the range of formats including books, microform, journals, pictures, audio and so on.

Other options include eResources - which I will come back to later - Then author, subject area, If you click the "more" to extend the subject list, you will see history related subject terms which allowed you to refine your search, for example by only look at Chinese history in a certain period of time or different aspect of the history.

Then we have series, decades, language of publication, publishers and place of publication.

So, we have got different ways of narrowing down a very broad search.

I'm going to choose "Chinese" here to limit the results to Chinese language publications only.

Here we still have over 30,000 items.

Before we refine the search further, let's click on the title to have a look at one of the cattle records to give you a sense of how to understand the information in it.

This is a book titled "Bei jiang tong shi - a complete history of China North Borderland."

So you can click on the title to go to the record page. The first line is the Romanised form of the title, the second line contains the Chinese title.

This is a book published in 2003 and it is in Chinese.

You can see the title, author, edition, publisher are described both in Romanised form and the Chinese script.

Scroll down to the bottom.

You can tell that we have a print copy of this book and if requested it will be available in the Main Reading Room of the Library building.

Now let's go back to the search page.

If you are residing some distance from Canberra and would like to read our E books or view our digitised collections from home, you can use the eResources options here to find online items.

There are two sources of eResources listed here.

We have items included in our subscribed database and NLA digital material which are generally old materials that are digitised and available freely online.

If we go for the subscribed database, leads will bring up a list of ebooks relating to the history of China that we subscribe from other databases.

To access them, you go into the record and use the online links to access them.

While in the Library building, we can access all of the eResources.

If you access the book from home, you will need to log in to use the databases.

We can, of course choose to view NLA digital materials.

So instead of the"subscribed database" we choose "NLA digital material."

The small images on the left of the title also indicates the image has been digitis ed.

We have 322 items including pictures, books, maps and manuscripts items.

You can click on the title to go to the catalogue records for more information on the title.

Or you can simply click on the image to view the digitised item.

For example, this is a poster of Mao published in 1970, which was during the Chinese Cultural Revolution period.

It depicts Mao Zedong above a group of soldiers from the Peoples Liberation Army, each of them holding a Little Red Book.

Which is a selection of Mao's sayings. The caption reads "The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the Great School of Mao Zedong Thought."

It is more than 50 years since the poster was created, but it's still so colorful and vivid.

It is a good item recording the history of China at the time or it could be a wonderful piece to study Chinese art or artists as well.

As we mentioned earlier, you can't only search in English, but also Asian scripts and sit under their Romanised form.

The following sessions would be most relevant to those who know the languages and would like to locate specific items.

For example, I enter this word in the search bar, which means economics in Korean.

This search returns 460 results.

It means that there are 460 records that include this particular Korean wide in their catalogue records such as title, editor and publisher fields.

Again, we can use the limiters on the right hand side to narrow search, or you can use the entries in the catalogue record to bring up similar items.

If you know the title or author name in Asian scripts, this is a good way to search records.

Finally, let's move to search with Romanised form.

This is particularly useful in locating items by their titles and authors in our Chinese and Japanese collections.

For Japanese items, romanisation is used to convert the pronunciation of scripts into Roman characters.

Transliteration of what requires correct pronunciation of the words.

The Japanese Romanisation system used at the library is themodified Hepburn system.

To enter our transcript, transliterated such phrase, divide it into "tango" units and "joshi" units which cannot be decomposed any further.

For example, if you are interested in education after the Second World War, you can use the words "sengokyoiku"

If I type it as one word.

No records hit.

However, dividing the world into minimal units.

I have 128 results.

As you see in the record, The word 'kyouiku" includes a macron. However, you can ignore it when you type because the catalogue will bring all records that include the word with and without macron.

As Rika said, using Romanisation to search titles and authors in our catalogue is the best way to identify Chinese items.

So, I will explain a little bit more about the Chinese Romanisation.

As the Chinese characters have simplified and traditional forms and our cataloguing rule is to transcribe which whichever form appears on the book, then describe the title, author and imprinting Romanisation.

Therefore, using the simplified or traditional character to search will only give you parts of the relevant results, and searching by correctRomanisation form it's more precise and comprehensive.

For Chinese collections, the Romanisation form we use in catalogue records is Pinyin, but we separate the Pinyin of each character with the space.

Except for persons giving names and place names.

For example, if I'm looking for a journal titled "Chinese Art" or "Zhongguo yi shu", I will enter "Zhongguo", which is China.

And since China is a name of a country or place, I connect the two syllabus, Zhong and Guo together, leaving no space in the middle.

And then "yi shu" separately.

And here it is

This is a journal called "Zhongguo yi shu"

If you are looking for books written by an author, for example, Mao Zedong, or about him.

The authorised form of the name Mao Zedong looks like this. Mao, family name, goes first and then you connect the given names, Zedong together.

Yeah, that's all about the Chinese Romanisation.

So much for the search of the catalog.

I'd like to draw your attention to the final part of the session.

Our eResources portal.

We have talked about the Trove's digital collections and subscribed ebooks, which can be found on our catalogue and there are lot more online resources we are offering via the eResources portal.

Let's go back to the Library homepage by clicking the Library icon on the top left corner of the page.

You will be able to find the eResources link here.

Just next to the search bar and the Trove portal.

Click on the E resources.

There will be a license agreement detailing the use conditions.

If you are happy with the terms and conditions, click "accept."

The portal works best when you log in first

See this yellow banner on top of the page. Log in using your library card number and your family name.

After logging you can use this search bar to look up resources, but I would suggest go to the browser resources tab.

This is the part where you really get a sense of what is available.

If you look down the left hand side of this menu, you will notice there is a list of subjects.

We want to look at the Asia Pacific database.

So just click the plus sign next to Asia Pacific and you can then see Asian studies.

Click on it.

The Asian studies related databases will come up in the panel on the right.

You can scroll down to browse.

The databases, used the A-Z alphabet or the search bar to search databases

if you have a name in mind.

Some of the popular databases include China Academic Journals or sometimes referred to as CNKI.

This resource indexes thousands of research level Chinese language journals.

We also subscribe to the Chinese national newspaper, the People's Daily.

Another database which may be of interest is PressReader.

Press reader provides access to over 7000 newspapers, magazines and periodicals in 60 languages from more than 120 countries.

This is the home page of PressReader

You can use the countries and languages option to find the publication of interest.

To find Chinese publications, you select the language and hit "Done".

Here are the titles in Chinese available.

I'm sure you will find some good reads in PressReader .

We have come to the end of our webinar today.

We hope everybody gets some ideas about the Library's Asian language collections.

We also encourage you to take a look at our getting started page and some other learning videos on our website.

If you need help, you can always turn to our Ask a Librarian service for assistance.

Thanks for watching.