Yeajin Park Min (she/her) joined Dartmouth College Library in March 2025. She is the Research and Learning Librarian for Humanities and Social Sciences, and works as the subject and liaison librarian for the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages (ASCL) Department at Dartmouth.
How did your journey in working with East Asian libraries and collections begin? Were there any opportunities that encouraged you to step into the East Asian Studies Librarianship?
In the beginning, my background was in archives as I studied Information and Archival Science. My journey into East Asian librarianship began at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa library, where I participated in the Korea Foundation (KF) Global Challenger program, an internship initiative for Korean studies librarianship brought by the Korea Foundation. It was the moment when I began to see librarianship as a profession centered on people and collections that spark questions and ideas. I am the type of person who wants to research everything about anything, while also realistically knowing that there’s a limit to my own capacity to pull that off. But then I found that if you’re a librarian, you have to know many different research interests to help your patrons, and that it is more fulfilling than working alone on my own thing. Supporting many people in their research and learning process has helped me see the world more broadly, and I love that about being a librarian.
What do you enjoy most about your career in East Asian librarianship so far?
I think the sense of fulfillment comes from moments when I reflect on my community’s interests in my collection. I really enjoyed dedicating my first year at Dartmouth Libraries to getting to know my Asian studies community alongside the collection. Knowing what my faculty members research and teach, what my students are researching and learning, as well as the school’s unique distinction of offering Asian studies only as an undergraduate program and its strong interdisciplinary connections with other departments, helped me delve into how these elements should be reflected in my collection and ultimately shape my librarianship here.
What would you like to achieve/accomplish in the next 5 years?
I aim to develop a strong sense of ownership over my collections. So, in the next five years, I should have a more solid familiarity with the collections than I do in my first year now. I would also like to work on developing special collections for the discipline of Asian studies within that timeframe and plan teaching programs that actively use those special collections. I expect to serve as a liaison to a couple of other departments in addition to ASCL in response to institutional needs.
What excites you in the development of East Asian librarianship in the future?
It may still be an open-ended answer, yet already a progressing area, but I’m quite excited to see how artificial intelligence literacy will find its place in East Asian librarianship, how it might change the ways we select and review collections, support patrons in discovery, access, and learning, and more.
Any particular professional area(s) or direction(s), ie. digital humanities, library consortia initiatives, etc. that catches your interest and that you want to further explore?
I’m interested in developing teaching skills and initiatives, juxtaposing East Asian librarianship and information literacy instruction. I also enjoyed the Small East Asian Collections Roundtable at this year’s CEAL annual meeting, and I would love to further connect with others who are engaged in related conversations and work.
Tell us some fun facts about you:
I lived in a convent dormitory in Rome, Italy, for about a year.
