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March 14, 2006
China Day 2: College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University
Many thanks to Caro Brey-Casiano for the use of her laptop in helping me continue to blog my experience here in China. I'm able to type notes in the meetings, and some things on the bus, which is causing a little motion sickness for me, but it's helping me keep up with the fast pace of our itinerary.
We spent the day Tuesday at the Beijing Normal University, which is also known as the Beijing Teachers University, since the specialization of the university is education, and our National Guides tell us it is one of the very best in China. Our first professional meeting of the day on Tuesday was to visit with the Professor Song and some of his students at the College of Information Science and Technology. This department once housed the Information Management major, which was also part of the library science course of study, but Professor Song explained that major has been moved over to the education and research school, while computer science and technolgoy and electronic enginnering majors remain in his department.
There are 60 faculty memebers, 400 undergraduates, and 200 post-graduates in his college, which comprises 6 major research subjects, including:
* Digital collections and museums
* Language information processing
* Space and geology systems
* Collaborations with the psychology department in the research of human recognition capabilities
* Computer hardware research
Prof. Song's specialization is how to digtize ancient antique books and building comprehensive databases to house the information. He also works in online distance education, including an excellent online program to teach Chinese to foreigners.
Our conversations this morning included many areas, but tended to focus on technology, resource sharing and management, and digital classification. I'll highlight some of the discussion here, but I'll be saving the really interesting but slightly complex discussion bits for when I get home.
How does one study become to a librarian? What education does it require?
One of Prof. Song's students explained that everyone in China who wants to go to college needs to pass a college entrance exam, but once in college, the information management major is common in most Chinese universities, with two specific concentrations: library management and management of information systems.
Currently she's seeking employment [like many librarians here in the states], and although she has attended job fairs seeking positions at various levels of library service, it seems that employers are preferring computer science majors to information management professionals, so there seems to be no profession-wide preference towards "professionals" in China.
Even when she was an undergraduate (she is now in post-doctoral study), while her program is like many others in requiring field work for the degree, few libraries are certified to allow students to do this kind of work study for credit (not for money), and the field work study period is much shorter than other programs to try to accomodate all of the students who need field work towards their degree. She could get a regular paying job in a library as a student, but those jobs are not reserved for library school students, anyone can work there.
Children's librarianship is a specialty in the US. Is there a specialization for children's librarianship in their program?
Prof. Song explained that no such specialization exists in the library management program, but that it may be included in the school of early education, instead.
How long is the program of study to become a librarian?
Library management is typically a 4-year undergraduate program.
Carol also extended an opportunity to Prof. Song and his group to ask questions.
From what Prof. Song knows of the US, university libraries have comprehensive collections, and are able to share those collection through the networking of catalogs and other online resource sharing, which is something he would like to do more, and know more about.
Carol began by explaining that the information sharing and system networking is not limited to university libraries. Many states have databases that are shared between many types of libraries, and there is widespread information sharing nationwide, through many different methods. This led into an extensive discussion of cataloging, metadata, and database management that I want to save for better treatment later.
Prof. Song then invited us to ask him and his group more questions.
In the US and Canada, public libraries are more than just information centers, but also community centers. How are future librarians in China trained in the sensitivity, philosophy, and skills to manage public libraries in these other [human interaction] aspects of the library?
Although the school emphasizes technology, technology is only a tool used to serve people, not the end goal. The goal of the program is to develop systematic and reasoning logic, the kind of thinking that will enable them to utilize the technology better to help patrons, and to continue to learn and grow over the course of their lifetimes, and not just to stick with what they learned in school and in textbooks.
For instance, the student who spoke earlier who is looking for a job, is such a great student that he's recommending her to the doctoral program, not just because of her skill and grades, but also because she's a great person, she meets the standard of personality for excellent public service.
Can you tell us more about the students who have accompanied you to the meeting today?
All three of the students are working in digitizing materials.
The first student, the woman who spoke about looking for a job, is working on digitizing an 1,800 year old dictionary, the first dictionary in the world, based in chinese characters. That work alone can be classified as a major! She is also working on a semantic system that analyzes the rules of how chinese characters are assembled from their smaller parts, in order to possibly find a way to digitally translate from Chinese to other languages.
The second student is working on digitizing copies of ancient tablets rubbings. He's working on a set of ancient temple rubbings, which will become a whole religious book.
The third student is working on machine translation of ancient chinese, which is very different from the simplified Chinese, into modern chinese.
While digitizing ancient texts is a priority, is there a movement to also preserve oral tradition in China? In an age of ever-changing storage technology, how do you decide which media to use?
Prof. Song is currently doing some work in this area. China has a rich heritage of legends, ancient love stories, and history that the people who work in the discipline of folk art and history are applying to Chinese government to make the oral history a non-physical heritage of the nation.
He's working on using a computer as a visible tool to enable access to the oral history materials [it sounds a lot like a kiosk or workstation concept].
In terms of media storage selection, because they need to act fast in order to preserve these materials before they disappear, the priority is to record the stories, transcribe them into a print record, and digitize them as soon as possible, doing the best they can with the best they have right now. There is no way of knowing what new technologies will emerge, so he is certain that this is the best way to preserve the oral traditions right now.
What distance education services are offered by his college, and how are the libraries involved?
Prof. Song explained that only 90,000,000 Chinese people have access to the internet (less than 1/13 of the population), and in many remote areas, building the technology resources is a challenge. Even with minimal technology resource, many rural citizens don't have time to learn, and less than 19% have access to college education. The Chinese government is paying more attention to the educational needs of the rural population, especially in extensive funding to educate farmers in agricultural technology. The government uses TV and radio programs to teach these programs right now, and at some point the university also wants to get involved in using the same avenues to extend distance education resources.
While our discussion was an hour and a half long, it really feels like we just scratched the surface. It's hard to further condense everything from the meeting, and while I could pick and choose what to highlight, everything we talk about is incredibly interesting and exciting, so it's a shame to weed anything out.
March 14, 2006 8:58 PM