The Handbook for Asian Studies Specialists is designed to be useful for library and information science students as well as librarians working in the area of Asian Studies research support and collection development. Within the handbook, Asian Studies is defined as a cross-disciplinary area of study related to East Asia, including China, Japan and Korea.
The majority of content is dedicated to an annotated bibliography of reference and research resources, with preceding chapters providing an introduction, instructions on use and a definition of the scope of Asian Studies. Within this scope, the cross-disciplinary needs of an Asian Studies collection are discussed, and the importance of this approach is also seen in the organization of the bibliography. The bibliography is broken down into chapters dedicated to specific countries, including chapters for general Asian Studies, China, Japan and Korea. These chapters are then divided into areas of study, spanning the humanities and social sciences.
Various scholar librarians were identified, through collaboration with the Council on East Asian Libraries (www.eastasianlib.org/), to contribute content in their area of specialization to the handbook and participate in the organization of these resources. Resources are not arranged alphabetically in the bibliography, but rather by usefulness and importance, as determined by the contributing librarians and editor. The collaborative nature of this organization yields a bibliography structured with usefulness in mind, vetted by a group of experienced librarians.
Chapters dedicated to the specific countries and regions are comprehensive. The chapter dedicated to China, especially offers significant information on the history and provenance of the curated resources. Many of the resources in these chapters are created and maintained by East Asian countries and require a familiarity with the written language and characters unique to East Asian languages. To assist with unfamiliar platforms and interfaces, the handbook provides general instructions on use in its annotations. Care is given to provide transliterated titles and original character titles, and differentiate between official transliterated titles found in catalogue records versus those provided by the handbook authors. The attention paid to these details further demonstrates the expertise and understanding of the special needs of Asian Studies.
The variety of resources makes this handbook stand out as a significant resource for Asian Studies specialists. The chapters bring together resources created by fellow librarians and Asian Studies scholars, subscription resources and freely available information portals maintained by governments and cultural institutions.
The chapter dedicated to general Asian Studies, however, suffers from being overly general. Non-specialized encyclopedias make the list, as well as common databases such as JSTOR (www.jstor.org/) and Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/). While an LIS student may find this helpful if reference resources are an entirely new topic, librarians who are looking for unique resources for Asian Studies may be disappointed.
While the majority of the handbook is a bibliography, the final chapter goes beyond this scope to address the management of Asian Studies collections in libraries. This chapter is focused on acquisitions, cataloguing, grant and other budget funding support, collection development and preservation. While the bibliography is great for a new librarian or a library and information science student, the final chapter dedicated to the technical services responsibilities that are unique to Asian language materials would be useful for an Asian Studies librarian with cataloguing and collection development responsibilities, as well as cataloguers and acquisitions staff.
