A dynamic organization devoted to library services for the East Asian studies communities in North America since 1958.

Kristina Troost Named the Inaugural Recipient of the CEAL Distinguished Service Award!

Kris Troost The Task Force on CEAL Distinguished Service Award (2018-2020) was charged with selecting an inaugural CEAL Distinguished Service Award recipient.

Dr. Kristina Troost is the 2020 recipient of the CEAL Distinguished Service Award. This prestigious award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to library service to the East Asian libraries/East Asian Studies and to CEAL.

Dr. Troost’s creativity, leadership and scholarship in service to East Asian libraries and East Asian Studies are abundantly exemplified by the exhaustive list of her activities and accomplishments throughout her career.

Dr. Troost is Japanese Studies Librarian and Head, East Asian Collection, Duke University Libraries. She has made numerous contributions to East Asian librarianship and has had an immense impact on many librarians and scholars in the East Asian studies field since 1990 when she became the Japanese bibliographer at Duke University Libraries. In the past thirty years, she has consistently expanded local and regional initiatives in ways that benefit the East Asian studies community in North America, and beyond.

She has participated in national and international professional communities from the early days of her career. She served as the Chair of the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) from 1998 to 2000 and as President of CEAL from 2008 to 2010. Her active involvement with these organizations has been a constant: guiding, mentoring, doing workshops, contributing to publications, and organizing conferences.

Dr. Troost has also provided distinguished service to scholarly organizations. She spent two terms as a member of the American Advisory Committee to the Japan Foundation, a prestigious appointment to a faculty body that assisted the foundation with policy and grant funding decisions. She has also been asked numerous times to participate in the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) panels and her thoughtful and knowledgeable comments have helped bring East Asian studies librarian concerns to these larger forums.

As a library professional at Duke, Dr. Troost has been recognized for her service. In 1997, she received the Florence Blakely Award, the highest staff honor conferred by Duke University Libraries. She has always gone to extra lengths to contribute to her institution. This included 17 years of service as Head of International and Area Studies, Japanese Studies Librarian and Director of Graduate Studies for the M.A. program in East Asian Studies at Duke, a period during which she mentored several of the most outstanding Chinese Studies librarians active in the U.S. and also painstakingly “grew” a temporarily-funded part-time position into a full-time Korean Studies Librarian slot.

CEAL is pleased to honor Dr. Kristina Troost with the inaugural 2020 CEAL Distinguished Service Award.

The Task Force on CEAL Distinguished Service Award includes:

Hana Kim, University of Toronto (Chair);

Rob Britt, University of Washington;

Yan He, George Washington University;

Kenneth Klein, University of Southern California;

Fabiano Rocha, University of Toronto;

Zhijia Shen, University of Washington (ex officio)