Report from Quanzhou, China  	Friday, Nov 5th


In Quanzhou, south of Fuzhou where I am now, the Library requested that I
give all three of my lectures on the same day. This would be more
convenient for the people coming from out of town. I gave those yesterday.
Doing it all in one day is no problem for me, but it makes a long hard day
for the translator. She had prepared well, translating my outlines into
Chinese and distributing those. And she had listened to the tapes of the
first lectures. Of course, I can use the same outline and give completely
different talks, so I don't know how much that helped. In any case, the
translation was difficult and she really had to work hard. In the future,
these talks should be broken up so the translator gets a rest every 15 or
20 minutes. Many of the people in this audience could understand much of
the English, however, so that helped.

The lectures were given in the lecture room of the Marine Transportation
Museum, which happens to be right next to the hotel. The museum has a
great collection of model ships representing very accurately those used at
the various times by the Chinese for war and exploration. This city is, of
course, famous for being the principle port over a thousand years ago for
exploration and trade with the rest of the world, particularly India.
There were people from many lands here engaged in this trade and the city
has had many old mosques from that period. The museum also has items
related to these ethnic groups. The lecture room is nicely done, but not
at all to our style. They had TV monitors, but no projection system.
Fortunately, they did have a white board so I could put up my unreadable
English for them. Not having a projector really cramps my style. The
various and sundry graphics I've been sticking in the lectures really
helps give them some dimension and flavor, although it would have helped
if I had more pictures or drawings of computers and networking gear.

 Of course, now that the lectures are over, I am beginning to get a better
idea of what they want or need to hear. I have been reviewing Library
Automation broadly and from a historical perspective, which is good as far
as it goes, but I should have added on some very specific details about
servers, networking equipment, and pc management. Maybe even a more
detailed review of Integrated Library Systems. Picking up on that
somewhat, I did go into some of these details in the Library Networking
talk. In the Reference talk I really emphasized the traditional role of
the librarian being extended to include the web and electronic resources,
i.e. that of organizing and managing information. And I tried to explain
how the library could be the 'portal' to the web for their public. We had
some time at the end of the talks, so they asked about our staff and
stuff. These audiences are very interested in the most specific details
about our libraries, including how much vacation we get, how long lunches
are, et al. I tried to explain that our unionized staff had a contract
that specified these details, but I don't how much of that they
understood. But they got the general idea of our vacation, anyway. I tried
to explain that we also get some time paid for being sick, which they
thought was novel. They can get time off for being sick too, but "they
don't know how long they are going to be sick".  They thought that was
very funny.  I have to agree, the west is weird.

Regardless of how good the translator is, a lot is lost in translation. It
has helped to have the few brochures in Chinese. These let the readers
absorb the information and not have to keep up as the translator and I are
talking. I would recommend that the next person have substantial material
already translated, such as a good complete description of their library
services, facilities, and staffing. That gives you a much better basis for
a conversation. Many times someone would come up to me with the brochure
in hand, point to a paragraph in Chinese, and note that "you mean that you
do such and such? " The Chinese are very interested in the details. I
should have brought more pictures with me also. A little album about the
library would be good. I have been able to show some people the internet
site and those pictures help, but in my opinion, the pictures we have of
our library on the internet do not make up a good representative set that
illustrates our various facilities very well or our services.

This morning we visited the Overseas Chinese University Library,
accompanied by my trusty translator Miss Chen and the head of the Quanzhou
public library rare books department, Mr Wu. The head of the library, Mr.
Weng, is planning a new building; to be a "digital library" with 500 pc's
in it. The library has had a pc lab with about 24 pc's for several years
where students can use CD's, search the library's catalog, or get onto the
internet. But he says that normally there are far more students wanting to
use the pc's than they have pc's for so they need to increase the numbers
considerably and possibly find some other way to manage the access to the
equipment. They do charge for the use of the pc's, 1 yuan an hour. about
12.5 cents. As at other university libraries I have visited, they are
happy with the students using the pc's for whatever they want to and are
not complaining about misuse. We got a tour of the acquisitions and
cataloging operations. They wanted me to comment on the differences
between Chinese Marc and US Marc. Right. I asked if they download records
from some national bibliographic database comparable to OCLC, but it
sounds like they don't. Each record has to be entered by hand. That's a
good project for someone. They are using an ILS called Sulcmis - Shenzhen
University Library Computerized Management Integrated (?) System. The web
site for that library is www.lib.hqu.edu.cn. The school has 7,000 students
who pay $350/year to go there. The name comes from the fact that much of
the funding for the school has been contributed by the overseas Chinese, a
big source of support in these parts of China, since many of the Chinese
who have emigrated have gone from these coastal areas to other parts of
Southeast Asia, but still retain close ties with their home cities.

We've had excursions to the:

1) Buddhist Kaiyuan Temple, which is a large site with two pagodas and
many other buildings. The area in front of the main temple building has
beautiful old Banyon trees.  

2) The Song dynasty (let's just say thousands of years old) stone carving
of Lao Tzu, early proponent of Taoism, which is one of China's own
religions, not imported.

3) Puppet theater for a
special show of their amazing work.

You know what they say, "all work and no play"!

Still trying to scratch the surface, in China,

brian