East Asian Studies 190: Bibliographical Resources

Dr. Hugh Blackmer
Tuesday Evenings, 7-9 PM
Parmly 302

 Assignments

Dramatis Personae
Brad Battista
Betsy Boardman
John Kerkering
Thaxton Mauzy
Marc McAfee
 Stephen Philipson
Dyllan Rankin
Jude Rolfes
Monica Schoenthaler
Cathay Smith
Brian Stearns
 Patrice Wedderburn

I want to do something interesting with this course. Some of the basics are pretty clear:

One priority is to improve access to the book collection at W&L; another is to build a better access to (and a management tool for) journals; another could be to build a means to handle spatial data on East Asia; and another is to give each participant an opportunity to explore a special topic of specific interest.

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Week 5: Finding the hidden... and deciding what to DO with what you've found

Week 4

Bibliographic Guides and week 3

 Bibliography of Asian Studies is clearly an important access point. Look at the Browse categories... what's missing? And what are its limits? (temporal, subject, etc.)

 footbinding

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So how can we approach the question of what are our holdings?
Ask Annie:
LCSH 'China...' 3287 headings, 10639 items;
'East Asia...' 340 headings, 835 items;
'Japan...' 3398 headings, 9039 items;
'Korea...' 646 headings, 1469 items...
and that doesn't count the items that subdivide geographically

I've started exploring Creating Lists from Annie, to give me some material to work with.

I have an extract of 741 titles, supposedly those with "Korea" somewhere in a subject heading, which I've been massaging with Word and Excel (the most completely massaged version is H:\koreash11.xls). Some 189 of them are Gov Docs or (in a few cases) in the Law School (a separate file: h:\korgovdocs.xls)
The problem with this file is that it has too much information --too big, too unwieldy to tell us much without a LOT of fiddling.
I've made another List of those with 'China' or 'Chinese' in Subject, intending to download it in much simpler format --ideally, to be able to sort the set by Call Number, to get a sense of the 'mapping' of 'China' in the collection. The underlying question: where besides DS?

And I have a somewhat complicated pair of Japan files; c:\eas190\japan2a.xls is 3276 records, 3194 with call numbers. \japan2b seems to be the MARC records for an uncertain total number (?5351?) --but I'm not sure yet whether it includes or doesn't include the 3276...