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Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Jeffrey Wang, reference specialist for the Chinese Collection, Asian Division.) The “Strange Tales from Liaozhai” (Liao zhai zhi yi 聊齋誌異), written in classical Chinese, is a collection of short stories from the early Qing dynasty (1644-1912). It consists of 491 tales in 16 volumes, mostly stories about fox-fairies, flower-spirits, …
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia
Posted by: Cameron Penwell
(The following is a post by Chelsea Hudson, Junior Fellow, Asian Division, Summer 2018.) The process of inventorying and cataloging the hundreds of thousands of items scattered across Library archives is in itself an exercise in reconstructing history. Each book or journal records the anonymous hands that have censored its text, drawn in its margins, …
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia, Junior Fellows
Posted by: Cameron Penwell
(This is a repost from the Library of Congress Blog. The authors are Sonya Lee, a Korean reference specialist in the Asian Division, and Cameron Penwell, a Japanese reference librarian. ) The Library’s Asian Division is home to one of the most prominent North Korean collections in the Western Hemisphere. While a growing number of scholars have …
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia
Posted by: Cameron Penwell
(The following post is an interview conducted by Jonathan Loar and Cameron Penwell, reference specialists in the Asian Division, with Dr. Emer O’Dwyer, associate professor of History and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College). This year, the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) was held in Washington, D.C. from March 22-25. At …
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Eiichi Ito, Japanese Reference Specialist, Asian Division.) The Library of Congress recently launched the Japanese Censorship Collection, an online archive comprising more than one thousand marked-up copies of government-censored monographs and galley proofs from prewar Japan. All the digitized materials in this collection are currently available for viewing onsite, …
Posted in: Asian Division, Digital Content, East Asia
Posted by: Cameron Penwell
(The following is a post by Cameron Penwell, Japanese Reference Librarian, Asian Division) On a shelf in the Japan rare book cage sits a small, unassuming wooden box next to a carefully preserved and tightly rolled scroll. Unfurled, the scroll reveals a hand-written Japanese text alongside fanciful images of anthropomorphic animals that together portray the …
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia