The Task Force for the 2022 CEAL Distinguished Service Award (2021-2022) was charged with selecting a recipient for the 2022 CEAL Distinguished Service Award.
We are privileged to announce that Dr. Peter Zhou is the recipient of the 2022 CEAL Distinguished Service Award. This prestigious award represents the highest honor that CEAL gives an individual who has made outstanding contributions to library service to East Asian libraries and/or East Asian Studies, and to CEAL.
Dr. Zhou’s creativity, leadership, and scholarship in service to East Asian libraries and East Asian Studies are abundantly exemplified by the exhaustive list of his accomplishments throughout his career.
Dr. Zhou is the director of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career in libraries as the Chinese Studies Librarian at the University of Iowa in 1991. He later served as the Head of the East Asia Library at the University of Pittsburgh before his current position at UC Berkeley. He has held posts as an affiliated professor and visiting scholar at many institutions nationally and internationally. His career is one of tireless efforts to create access to the scholarly works and literatures of East Asia.
In supporting the CEAL community, he is best known for his tenure as President from 2012-14. He transformed the CEAL annual meeting to one based on challenging themes in East Asian Librarianship. Inviting outside speakers, he built bridges between CEAL and the larger library and scholarly community. His efforts contributed toward a successful CEAL grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund innovative projects throughout the CEAL community.
Dr. Zhou is a prolific scholar with an impressive record of publications. The breadth of and depth of his publications speak to the challenges and innovation in handling rare materials, digital humanities and digital preservation, big data, and much more. For many in the CEAL community, most will first think of his work compiling Collecting Asia, East Asian Libraries in North America 1868-2008. The first monograph to systematically document the history of 25 major East Asian collections in North America.
No summary of Dr. Zhou’s career is complete without mentioning the intense effort he led in fundraising to build the C. V. Starr East Asian Library on the UC Berkeley campus. Its grand opening in 2008 brought many colleagues together throughout the CEAL community and beyond to celebrate a historic moment for East Asian Studies in North America.
Beyond such impressive accomplishments, Dr. Zhou is thoughtful, kind, and generous with his time. He has been a mentor to many East Asian librarians. For all of these reasons, CEAL proudly honors Dr. Peter Zhou with its highest award.
The Task Force for the 2022 CEAL Distinguished Service Award includes:
Zhijia Shen University of Washington (Chair)
Jee-Young Park University of Chicago
Toshie Marra University of California, Berkeley
Yan He George Washington University
Adam H. Lisbon University of Colorado Boulder
Hana Kim University of Toronto (Ex-Officio)
