CEAL 2006 Election: Personal Statements of Candidates


Names are arranged in alphabetical order

Su_Chen | Hitoshi_Kamada | Joy_Kim | Toshie_Marra | Ellen_McGill

Kuniko_Yamada_McVey | Taemin_Park | Kristina_Troost | Hong_Xu | Kuang-tien_(K.T.)_Yao


 

Su Chen  

 

Su Chen, Head of East Asian Library at University of Minnesota Libraries, previously worked as East Asian Studies Librarian at McGill University, received her M.L.I.S from McGill University and M.A. in Philosophy from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

It is my goal to promote exchanging ideas and sharing experiences among East Asian librarians as well as with colleagues in China, Japan and Korean to broaden our views and strengthen our knowledge about these countries for quality services to our patrons.

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         Hitoshi Kamada


Statement by Hitoshi Kamada

I have been the Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Arizona  Library since 1999. Currently, I also work as the Assessment Coordinator for the University of Arizona Library System. I possess a MLIS from the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Public Administration granted by the University of Victoria, Canada. If elected as Secretary, I will ensure both good recordkeeping and smooth administration of CEAL elections and will engage in the business of CEAL Executive Board.

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Joy Kim

  
 

I started my professional library career as a Japanese cataloger at the Los Angeles Public Library in early 1985, shortly after receiving my MLS from UCLA. While I enjoyed Japanese cataloging itself, I did not feel that I belonged in the public library setting. After six months I moved to the University of Southern California (USC) as Korean cataloger, where I soon became the Leader of the CJK Cataloging Team and Curator of the Korean Heritage Library. I have held this same position ever since, developing one of the best Korean collections in North America at USC.       

Since joining the CEAL in early 1986, I have been actively serving in the following offices:  
 

·        Co-Chair (with Philip Melzer, next CEAL President), Special Committee for 2006 IFLA Seoul, 2005-

·        Secretary, 2002-2006

·        Member, Executive Board, 1998-2006

·        Committee on Korean Materials, 1989-2005

Chair, 1999-2002;  Member, Task Force on Revision of the Korean Word Division Rules, 2004-2006

·        Member, Committee on Technical Processing, 1987-1996, 2005-

  

OCLC CJK Users Group

  • Korean Officer, Executive Board, 1991-1995, 1997-2001 (Recorder, 1998-2000)

  • Member, Program Committee, 1991-1995, 1998-2001

  • Member, Task Force on Cooperative Retrospective Conversion, 1991-1995

Korean Collections Consortium of North America

  • Chair, 2001/2002;  Acting Chair, 1996;  Secretary, 1993-1995

I am now seeking an opportunity to serve the CEAL membership at a higher level.  My previous positions at CEAL, especially that of Secretary during the past three years, have given me a good understanding of our organization’s missions, strengths, and challenges and prepared me for this new challenge.

The field of East Asian librarianship has been so dynamic in recent years that it is difficult to predict how it will develop in the future.  Yet I see that the following will always remain important to us all: recruiting best talents into East Asian librarianship and CEAL; professional growth of the members; better communicating and marketing our specialized services to our users and administrators; maintaining good visibility in the mainstream librarianship field, etc. I wish to have an opportunity to play an active role in achieving these goals and making an impact.   

I believe I have a good combination of the leadership qualities that are necessary for this office: a passion for the profession, especially for East Asian librarianship; skills to delegate, motivate, and mobilize other people's talents; the energy and the drive to get things done; communication and interpersonal skills; knowledge and experience as a practicing librarian in the field, etc.  My position at USC has trained me in almost all aspects of librarianship that CEAL members care about: collection development, technical services, public services, instruction, management, outreach, grant writing, etc.  I am also fortunate to have a great support system at USC and beyond—the people to whom I can turn for guidance and advice when things get rough, including a few past presidents of CEAL. 

CEAL has been the single most important professional organization in my life as a librarian.  Having grown professionally in it, I have developed the greatest respect and pride for this remarkable organization. During the past 8 years of serving on the Executive Board, I have experienced and admired the collegiality, dedication, collective energy, and power of many bright minds working together toward a common goal. I would feel honored to have the privilege to serve this great organization as Vice President/President Elect.    

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Toshie Marra


Toshie Marra
Japanese Studies Librarian, UCLA
Statement

I am extremely honored to be nominated for the position of Treasurer within the CEAL Executive Committee.  Since I became a CEAL member in early 1990s, I have been greatly benefiting from all the activities that CEAL has developed and its services offered to all of us members. I think that this is my turn to return some of the enormous debts that I owe to my wonderful colleague librarians in the field of East Asian studies in North America.

With CEAL I served for two terms as a member on the Committee on Japanese Materials (CJM) from 1999 to 2005, and have been serving as Chair of the Subcommittee on Japanese Rare Books (formerly known as Subcommittee on Japanese Rare Book Cataloging Guidelines) since 2000. One of the accomplishments during my service to this Subcommittee was publication of “Directory of North American Collections of Old and Rare Japanese Books, Other Print Materials, and Manuscripts” in JEAL October 2003 issue and its revised version subsequently on CJM website, which was compiled collaboratively with Mr. Hideyuki Morimoto and Ms. Reiko Yoshimura.

Although I have never served as Treasurer for any organizations of this scale, my current responsibilities as Japanese Studies Librarian at UCLA and as Chair of the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) with which I regularly monitor budgets and expenses might help somehow. I believe that healthy finances and effective management of funds are key to the success of organizations like CEAL. Thank you very much for your attention.               

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Ellen McGill

 

 

Ellen McGill
CEAL ballot statement

I am a relative newcomer to CEAL and to the world of librarianship.  My academic background is in Chinese and Inner Asian history, with a focus on the social history of Inner Mongolia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I hope to finish my dissertation for Columbia University in the coming year, although I think I said that last year too!  My experience in libraries has primarily been in public services.  As an undergraduate and graduate student, respectively, I worked in circulation and shelving for the Management School Library at Cornell and as an electronic resources assistant for the School of Social Work at Columbia.  I began at the Harvard-Yenching Library in 2001 and moved to my current position in reference and electronic resources the following year. 

I very much appreciate the nomination for the position of Secretary, and I welcome the chance to learn more about CEAL and the broader world of East Asian libraries.  I don’t know that I have many qualifications to bring to the post, besides reasonable typing and listening skills. But I do have an abiding interest in history, and I take seriously the need to preserve a record of what we do and think as an organization.  If elected, I would do my best to provide comprehensive and timely minutes that will serve both the current and future generations of CEAL members.  Thank you very much.

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Kuniko Yamada McVey


I have been the Japanese language bibliographer at the Harvard-Yenching Library for the past six years after working as a librarian at another Harvard library, the Documentation Center on Contemporary Japan for tenyears. I had served a chair of the CEAL committee on Japanese materials 2002-2005.

Saying “Academic libraries and librarianship are in the middle of major change” is becoming a cliché. Yet, we still seem to be attached to a mind set of an orderly and static world of library, a perfect world without Google and Amazon. Our users are making classroom presentation using I-movie, or GIS software. How can we serve their needs? As most of public domain information becomes available online, what will we do? I believe the best way to keep libraries and our profession relevant is to embrace this change. This is an exciting time when we can be creative and imaginative. It would be my honor if I could serve the CEAL executive committee and could make some difference to this community of so many dedicated librarians.

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Taemin Park


My name is Taemin Park and I am a candidate for CEAL Members-at-Large.

I am an Associate Librarian at Indiana University, Bloomington. My library experience has been in cataloging (including CJK), serials acquisition and cataloging, as well as teaching cataloging related courses in the IU-SLIS program. My service to the profession has included: Chair, Scholarly Communications Discussion Group; Member, Research and Statistics Interest Group in ALA/ALCTS and; Member,  Committee on Technical Processing of CEAL. I am currently serving as a member of the Taskforce on RDA of ALCTS/CCS/CC:AAM.

My primary professional interest has been in the areas of bibliographic control and access, including digital resources. I would like to have the opportunity to continue to serve CEAL in this new capacity, as it will provide yet another effective avenue for me to help promote our resources, services and cooperative endeavors.

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Kristina Troost

I am honored to be asked to run for CEAL President; as a member of CEAL for 16 years, CEAL has been a source of knowledge, training and comradeship that has made me more effective as a librarian and has benefited my users and my institution.

The CEAL president has, in my opinion, two roles: to provide an environment which will nurture us in our common pursuits and to provide a public voice on the issues confronting libraries in general and East Asian librarianship in particular.  My background as both the head of a department of area studies librarians and a Japanese Studies librarian as well as my service to the profession will aid me in these tasks.  Trained as a historian (Ph.D., Harvard 1990),  librarianship has become my avocation.  At Duke, over the past fifteen years, I have provided reference service, developed web pages, built collections, overseen recon, served on campus committees, and even done some cataloging; while my primary responsibility has been for Japan, I have at times had responsibility for China and Korea. Serving on various university committees  has allowed me to bring issues related to publishing and librarianship to the conversation.

Nationally, my efforts have been focused on both CEAL and the North American Coordinating Council for Japanese Library Resources (NCC).  I served as Chair of the NCC from 1998 to 2000 and organized the Year 2000 conference to mark its tenth anniversary.  I continue to be active by serving on the Train the Trainer task force and as an instructor for the Junior Japanese Studies Librarians Professional Training Seminar.  In terms of CEAL, I have served on several committees and task forces, most notably, the Public Services Committee, and I am currently serving on the Executive Committee. 

My role as a member of the Japan Foundation’s American Advisory Committee (AAC) blends my two roles as advocate for libraries within the scholarly community and as subject specialist  --  through dialogue, we have changed the grant guidelines and educated faculty on the importance of seeing our resources and activities as national and international in scope.

East Asian libraries are confronting the same issues as our main libraries – how to educate our users in the best ways of seeking information, how to provide access to materials regardless of where they are housed, how to maximize the diversity of our collections, how to share our unique materials and how to preserve what we have.  The adoption of digital technologies for teaching and research is leading to new models of scholarly exchange – we, as librarians, need to actively participate in these discussions.  I view my role as President of CEAL to provide both the space for us to share our knowledge and national leadership in addressing these issues in the library and scholarly communities.

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Hong Xu (徐鴻)


 

I am the Head of the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh. I received my MLS from the School of Library and Information Science at Wuhan University, China, an M.Ed in Educational Psychology, and a PhD in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

My library experience has been in management, fund raising, collection development, international cooperation, and information organization and technology.  My major service to the profession has included:  Executive Director of Luce Summer Institute for East Asian Librarianship: China Focus (2004);  members of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Electronic Library and Journal of Educational Media and Library Sciences (Taiwan); an organizer and moderator of over ten professional conference panels. Chair (2001-2002), Program Chair (2000-2003), Communication Officer (1999-2000) of the International Information Issues (SIG III), American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST);  

I have been nominated to run for one of the Members-at-Large positions of the CEAL Executive Board.  I promise that if I am elected, I will represent the CEAL general membership to actively participate in Executive Board meetings and other assigned duties.  With my experience and knowledge background in the field, I am confident that I will provide constructive ideas/suggestions to promote policies appropriate to the achievement of CEAL’s objectives.  I am eager to work with other Board members to create innovative programs and explore challenges and opportunities for the development of the East Asian library resources and services, and the enhancement of the international cooperation.

 TRUST ME AND VOTE FOR ME!

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Kuang-tien (K.T.) Yao



My name is Kuang-tien (K.T.) Yao.  I am a China Studies Librarian at the University of Hawaii (UHM) Library and have been a good standing member of CEAL since 1997.  I have worked not only in reference and collection services, but also in technical services.   Because of my language skill and technical service background I was appointed by UHM Library to represent the Hawaii Voyager Library System to serve on Unicode™ Task Force Committee for Endeavor Information System, Inc.  The Unicode™ Task Force Committee consisted library representatives from the United Kingdom, Finland and across the United States to work with the Unicode™ standard and multilingual scripts as Endeavor Development staff members planed for its critical phase progress. 

Currently, I am serving as one of the eight members on CEAL’s Committee on Chinese Materials (CCM).  I found the committee work not only challenging but also rewarding.  As a fairly new member of the CEAL, I would like to have the opportunity to extend my services not only to the Chinese librarians, but also to all members of the CEAL.  If I am elected to be Members-at-Large, I shall do my best to represent the members to provide feedback to the Executive Board.

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