CEAL Executive Committee Meeting Minutes

 Meetings I and II: The Executive Group of the Committee on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) met on Tuesday, April 4, 1995, from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. and on Saturday, April 8, 1995 from 7:00 to 8:30 a.m. in the Washington Hilton and Towers Hotel, Washington, D.C.

Present: Ken Klein (USC) [chairperson], Doris Seely (Minnesota) [Secretary], Sachie Noguchi (Pittsburgh) [Treasurer], Yasuko Makino (Columbia), Anna U (Toronto), Tai-loi Ma (Chicago), Yoon-Hwan Choe (Washington), Charles Wu (Columbia), Hideyuki Morimoto (UC Berkeley), and Ed Martinique (North Carolina); on Tuesday only: Karl Kahler (Pennsylvania), Yasuko Matsudo (Michigan), and Ai-Hwa Wu (Arizona State); on Saturday only: Eizaburo Okuizumi (Chicago), Maureen Donovan (Ohio State) [guest], Bill McCloy (Washington Law), Ichiko Morita (Japan Documentation Center), and Cathy Chiu (UC Santa Barbara).

Subcommittee Reports

Since no subcommittee reports were scheduled for the plenary session this year, Klein began the Tuesday night meeting by asking for news from the subcommittees.

Technical processing-Charles Wu. Next year in Honolulu the Subcommittee needs another two hours, in addition to the regular two-hour meeting, for the discussion of Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) cataloging problems. These two hours could be consecutive to the regular meeting or at a different time in a smaller room, since fewer people would be expected to attend-perhaps fifty.

Korean Materials-Yoon-whan Choe. The Korean consortium has met and now has seven members, including Chicago. The Subcommittee tried to get a speaker from Korea for the meeting this year but could not find sufficient funds. They will try again next year.

Library Technology-Hideyuki Morimoto. The handout from last year's preconference workshop has been printed and distributed. A CEAL home page has been set up on the World-Wide Web (WWW) and one subcommittee member is working on a demonstration of the use of WWW with both English and CJK languages.

Chinese Materials-Tai-loi Ma. The main concern of the Subcommittee has been the attempt of a cartel of People's Republic of China publishers to fix extravagantly high prices for Chinese books through the use of a grossly inflated exchange rate. CEAL members used faxes and the Internet to discuss the problem, held a special meeting on the matter in Chicago in October, and sent a letter of protest signed by Klein and Ma on behalf of CEAL. The vendors were surprised and held meetings of their own at which they decided they will no longer act as a cartel but will deal with libraries as individual companies. They will use more flexible and, in some cases, lower exchange rates than those originally proposed. The presidents of three of the vendor companies were to speak at the Thursday meeting of the Subcommittee.

The Subcommittee wants to present a workshop on the education of Chinese librarians but there was not time to set one up this year.

Public Services-Yasuo Makino. Responses to the survey on members' expectations of this new subcommittee show that interlibrary loan and bibliographic instruction are topics virtually everyone would like to see addressed.

Klein requested that in the future subcommittee chairs submit annual reports to the CEAL chair by mid-January so that the information can be included in the CEAL annual report.

Relations with Other Organizations (scheduling conflicts in Washington this year and in Honolulu next year)

Klein discussed the need for closer cooperation and coordination among various groups holding meetings in conjunction with the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). This year, the Research Libraries Group, Inc. and the OCLC Online Computer Center, Inc. (OCLC) held their meetings at the same time, perhaps assuming that Research Libraries Information Network users and OCLC CJK users are mutually exclusive groups, but several people are involved in both and found this arrangement unacceptable. The Asian Libraries Liaison Committee (ALL) was to sponsor a Friday evening roundtable this year, in preparation for a more ambitious program in Honolulu. When the AAS did not accept the program as an official AAS roundtable, the other organizations involved apparently assumed that it was cancelled. Only CEAL kept the Friday evening time slot open for it and it eventually fell through due to scheduling conflicts among would-be participants. The Library of Congress (LC) and ALL scheduled a meeting at LC on Thursday afternoon in conflict with the CEAL subcommittee meetings. To prevent these kinds of conflicts in the future, we need to start the planning and scheduling process much earlier and coordinate more closely with other groups meeting at AAS.

This point was strongly reinforced on Saturday morning when Maureen Donovan met with the Executive Group to report on the work of the ad hoc committee appointed by Evelyn Rawski to develop a program involving both librarians and teaching faculty for Honolulu. Donovan is chair of this committee; other members include James Nye (Chicago), Helen Poe (LC), Jutta Reed-Scott (Center for Research Libraries), and Louis Lancaster (UC Berkelely). Donovan reported that the Committee proposes to hold an all-day workshop on building the virtual library in Asia on Thursday, 11 April 19996, in Honolulu. It is planned to consist of four two-hour sessions, each dealing with different kinds of electronic information sources. The committee members deem it very important to hold the workshop at the beginning of the AAS conference so that it will lead into a roundtable to be held near the end of the conference. This means that all the Thursday CEAL subcommittee meetings would have to be either rescheduled or somehow incorporated into the Thursday workshop. After some debate the Executive Group acceded to the Committee's request and will reschedule the Subcommittee meetings. A tentative revised schedule for Wednesday would feature a shortened plenary session and four subcommittee meetings.:

8:00-10:00 a.m. Plenary Session 10:00-12:00 noon Subcommittee 1 1:00-3:00 p.m. Subcommittee 2 3:00-5:00 p.m. Subcommittee 3 7:00-9:00 p.m. Subcommittee 4

The remaining two subcommittee meetings would have to be fitted in later in the conference or melded, totally or in part, into the Thursday workshop.

Proposed Name Change

Klein reported on Tuesday that the proposed ballot prepared by the task force appointed for that purpose would be presented at the plenary session. The ballot included three items. The first was a yes or no vote on amending the CEAL procedures in order to implement a name change. The second was a choice between two possible new names: East Asian Libraries Association (EALA) and Council of East Asian Libraries. The third was a choice among three designations for the head of the new organization: chairperson, director, or president.

On Saturday two changes were made that had been requested and approved at the plenary session. First, the proposed name "Council of East Asian Libraries" was changed to "Council on East Asian Libraries". Second, spaces for write-in names were added under items two and three and the word "other" was to be bracketed in as appropriate in the proposed changes to the CEAL procedures. A new ballot incorporating these changes was distributed by Klein on 24 April 1995. The results of the ballot are that, by a vote of 92 to 6 (93 per cent in favor), the CEAL membership voted to change the name from "Committee on East Asian Libraries" to "Council on East Asian Libraries". The "Chairperson" is now to be called "President". Voting was as follows:

1. Proposal to amend Yes: 92 (93.3 percent) No: 6 (6.7 percent

2. CEAL's new name

East Asian Libraries Association (EALA) 39 (39.7 percent) Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) 57 (58.1 percent) Council of East Asian Libraries (CEAL) 1 Society of East Asian Libraries (SEAL) 1

3. Chairperson's new name

Chairperson 35 (36 percent) Director 10 (10.3 percent) President 51 (52.5 percent)

These changes formally take effect on 1 July 1995. The June issue of the CEAL Bulletin (no. 106) will be the last to carry that name. Afterwards it is to be the Journal of East Asian Libraries.

CEAL Bulletin and Directory

Noguchi reported that there are now 117 institutional subscribers and 261 personal CEAL members, for a total of 378 subscribers. There have been several requests for the CEAL mailing list and Noguchi asked whether we should charge for it. The Executive Group agreed that we will charge commercial organizations $50.00, which is the minimum charged by the AAS for mailing labels. Not-for-profit organizations will not be charged.

It has been suggested that we solicit advertising for the Bulletin as has sometimes been done in the past. Members of the Group will contact Karl Lo and Thomas Lee to ask how they handled advertising when they were CEAL chairs.

Martinique suggested that if we eventually have some extra funds from the sale of mailing labels or advertising or both, we might want to consider using some of them for improved production values for the Bulletin. If the name of the Bulletin changes along with the name of the organization, might we also want to make some changes in the format, size, and content at the same time?

Seely asked what the CEAL policy on complimentary copies of the CEAL Bulletin for contributors should be. The Executive Group recommended that authors of articles should receive one complimentary copy each. If they need more extra copies or air mail delivery, they must pay for the extra copies or for the extra costs of shipping and handling. Martinique will send addresses of authors not on the CEAL mailing list to Noguchi so that she can produce mailing labels.

Klein announced the the CEAL Directory was put on the University of Southern California Gopher just a day or two before the CEAL meetings began this year.

Ballots Counted; Outgoing Members Thanked

The ballots for the election of four new members of the Executive Group were opened and the votes tallied. The final count showed that Bill McCloy and Ichiko Morita had been elected to three-year terms. Min-chih Chou was elected to serve for two years and Cathy Chiu for one year. The Group thanked outgoing members Karl Kahler, Yasuko Matsudo, and Ai-Hwa Wu for their services to CEAL during the past three years.

Proposed Cancellation of Doctoral Dissertations on Asia

We had been alerted at the meeting of the Public Services Subcommittee to the proposal of the Ad Hoc Committee on Publications of the AAS to cease publication of Doctoral Dissertations on Asia. Klein's letter to John Campbell, Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee, protesting this proposal on behalf of CEAL was approved by the Executive Group on Saturday. The letter was to be delivered to Campbell that same day in order that it might reach him before the Sunday meeting at which the decision on the proposal was to be made.

Other Business

Several members of the Executive Group reported receiving complaints from members about speeches at subcommittee meetings in East Asian Languages for which no English translation or abstract was provided. Klein asked that subcommittee chairs try to arrange for some sort of translation or interpretation or both in the future.

Subcommittee chairs reported mixed results in trying to maintain contacts with the chairs of the China and Inner Asia Council and the Northeast Asia Council of the AAS-no success with Rubie Watson of CIAC and some with Sharon Minichiello of NAC. Klein urged the subcommittee chairs to continue to pursue these contacts.

Submitted by Doris Seely