By Lucy Li
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, libraries are constantly trying to interpret, incorporate, and revise approaches toward generative artificial intelligence (AI) in collection management, public services, and research. Despite dealing with specialized languages and geographic areas, this development holds true for East Asian libraries, too. My experience as a librarian at the Tateuchi East Asia Library at the University of Washington (UW) affirms this.
How is the industry thinking about AI? Some insights can be gleaned from the 2024 Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) annual conference held in Seattle in March. With the theme of Artificial Intelligence: Its Impacts on the East Asia Library, it should not come as a surprise that presentations and discussions in the conference are centered on the current and potential practical and ethical uses of AI in libraries.
For instance, Dr. Kwok Leong Tang from Harvard University pointed out that integrating librarian expertise and AI strengths would enhance discovery, information decision-making, and personalized services. In like-minded fashion, UW’s Information School Professor Bill Howe said that responsible AI output depends on information professionals and field experts to curate authentic and accurate data for AI tools, instead of relying on the tools’ ability to take massive but convenient samples from the internet for training.
Human expertise is still valued by libraries. This observation seems to gel with my own professional interactions with subject experts. Shortly before the CEAL conference, I met with Hedy Law, an associate professor of musicology at the University of British Columbia, who spent four days in Tateuchi East Asia Library examining one of our most unique rare items, the Mu Yu Shu 木魚書. This is a set of over 300 books of Cantonese folk songs published between the late 19th and early 20th century in China. Professor Law and I had many interesting conversations about how this set of materials could be used for research that ranges from folklore to women’s studies in China’s late Qing dynasty.
The discussions at the CEAL conference and my conversations with Professor Law made me think that while AI will be useful making our collections easily accessible and analyzable, it would require many further interdisciplinary collaborations to make the resource input accurate, authentic, and useful. Furthermore, interdisciplinary collaborations and community networking are what librarians do every day that AI cannot replace at this stage.
Interdisciplinary collaboration has always been an integral part of the Tateuchi East Asia Library’s collection curation and management. For example, the above-mentioned Mu Yu Shu collection was cataloged in detail with help from Professor Bell Yung, an expert in Chinese ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh. Over the years, many more rare special collection items in our library have been verified, cataloged, and preserved with the help of visiting librarians with expertise on ancient books from China, Japan, and Korea. Having achieved this, researchers from UW and other institutions, like Professor Law, can then share further expert insights through close examinations of these materials. Together, these efforts can provide accurate bibliographic information to library users.
The Tateuchi East Asia Library collection holds more than 800,000 volumes of books, newspapers, and media that cover a wide range of disciplines related to China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and beyond. The local community also contributed greatly to our collection. In the past year, we have received multiple individual community member donations. One of the items we received was a rare anthology of works by the famed Song dynasty poet, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). Published in the 17th century during the Ming dynasty, this set of books is of great value for researching the publication history of this text and its distribution throughout time. Along with book donations, we have also received monetary gifts from our community members to catalog and further preserve our resources to better serve our users, inside and outside of the university.
Collaborations on resource building also go beyond the print collection. Digitization has transformed research in today’s libraries by way of lighting fast query built on data retrieval and manipulation, but they also present preservation concerns when access becomes an issue. This had happened in 2022 when overseas access to one of the largest statistical and census database services in China was suspended. In response to this data loss, academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada started sharing print titles, pushing vendors for backup files, and improving license agreement terms for the future.
AI technology is certainly changing the landscape of librarianship to replace certain repetitive tasks, provide easier access, and support powerful analysis for users. Yet, expertise and domain knowledge are still needed to ensure information accuracy and authenticity. Librarians will continue to work collaboratively with field experts, community members, and AI tools to better organize our resources and customize our services. The Tateuchi East Asia Library is committed to maintaining its storied collection of ancient and modern texts by consulting human experts, while also incorporating modern and future technologies so that we can continue to provide world-class services to scholars, students, and community members here and around the world.
Lucy Li is the interim China Studies Librarian at the University of Washington’s Tateuchi East Asia Library. She graduated from the UW Information School with a Master’s in Library and Information Science, and the UW Jackson School of International Studies with a Master’s in China Studies. Views expressed here do not reflect those of the institutions referenced. This is the latest quarterly op-ed contribution by faculty, students, and affiliates from the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at UW.
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