College and Research Libraries WILLIAM SHEH WONG Alfred Kaiming Chiu and Chinese American Lihrarianship A sketch of the life of Alfred Kaiming Chiu (1898-1977) and his contribu- tions to librarianship shed light on the achievements of Chinese American librarians in the United States. During the half-century of his professional career , Dr. Chiu devised a classification scheme for Chinese and Japanese books; built three librari es; trained young librarians , thus developing a group of competent Chinese American librarians ; and published countless scholarly works. He can be seen as one who epitomizes the concept of the "ideal librarian ," one who combines practical experience with scholarly endeavor. ON NOVEMBER 13, 1977, Alfred Kaiming Chiu died , thus bringing to a close a distin- guished half-century career of service to li- brarianship. Anyone familiar with the con- tributions of Chinese American librarians in the United States would agree that through his labors Dr. Chiu earned a special place of honor among Chinese American librar- ians . Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote , "There is properly no history , only biography ," and more than thirty years ago Jesse Shera indi- cated that a neglected area of research in li- brary scie nce has been biography. 1 Only re- cently Edward G . Holley regretfully noted that our profession has entered its second century without a definitive biography of Melvil Dewey. 2 Since thorough and com- prehensive biographies of pioneer librarians are essential in understanding the motivat- ing forces behind the rise and development of our profession, this paper is offered as a brief description of the life of Alfred Kai- ming Chiu and his activities in librarianship. William Sheh Wong is East Asian librarian and professor of library administration , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the an- nual conference of the Chinese American Librar- ians Association in Detroit on june 19, 1977. The research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the Council on Library Resources. 384 I Strictly speaking, Alfred Kaiming Chiu was neither the first Chinese to receive a diploma or degree from an American library school, nor was his work as a Chinese in an American library unprecedented. 3 The his- tory of several Oriental vernacular language collections in the United States can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, but the re was no significant growth of East- Asian collections until the 1930s. If the or- ganization of the Harvard-Yenching Insti- tute Library in 1927 had been Dr. Chiu' s sole contribution to the field , it alone would have earned him a position as a major leader in Chinese American librarianship. Furthermore , the long span of his profes- sional career and the various contributions he made to American librarianship appear to be unmatched among his colleagues. As one who combined practical experi- ence with scholarly achievement , Alfred Kiaming Chiu epitomizes the concept of an " ideal librarian." During his career Dr. Chiu devised a classification scheme for Chinese and Japanese books, built three li- braries, worked nearly forty years as librar- ian of the Harvard- Yenching Institute , trained young librarians, helped develop a group of competent Chinese American li- brarians, and published countless scholarly and professional works . 4 Born into a merchant family of modest means in the town of Chen-hai in Chekiang Chiu and Chinese American Librarianship I 385 Province on March 11, 1868, Alfred Kai- ming Chiu studied the traditional Confucian curriculum as a young boy, interned in a large bookstore, went on to study in a modern school, and enrolled in the first class that would graduate from China's ini- tial library school. He received his B.A. de- gree from the Boone Library School at Boone University (later called Hua-chung or Central China College), Wuchang, Hupeh Province, in January 1922. After graduation he became the first li- brarian at Amoy University in Amoy, Fu- kien Province, and it was here he came into contact with Japanese culture, studied the Japanese language, and increased his knowledge of Chinese literature and bibli- ography. He traveled to the United States, first for advanced study in library science and, later, graduate work in economics. In 1924 he attended the Library School of the New York Public Library where he received a diploma. A year later he enrolled at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, majoring in economics while working as a volunteer at Widener Library on the Cambridge campus. He re- ceived his master's degree in February 1927 and continued working toward a doctorate, which was conferred in 1933. In January 1927 when Harvard's librarian offered him a full-time position processing Chinese and Japanese language materials at the college library, he happily accepted and proudly began his career as a Chinese American librarian. 5 CATALOGING AND CLASSIFICATION Drawing upon the experience and knowl- edge gained in China and the United States, Dr. Chiu devised a unique classifica- tion scheme for Chinese and Japanese books, which was subsequently adopted by many American libraries with collections in East Asian languages. The feature of the scheme was the use of a four-digit notation, except for classics, in- stead of the common practice of three di- gits. The nine main divisions are: 100--999, Chinese classics; 1~1999; philosophy and religions; 2000-3999, historical sciences; 4000-4999, social sciences; 5000-5999, lan- guage and literature; 6()()()...-6999, fine and recreative arts; 7000-7999, natural sciences, 8000--8999, agriculture; 9000--9999, gener- alia and bibliography. Developed originally from the traditional Chinese systems of book classification, the scheme had definite advantages in handling traditional literature and scholarship. It was, perhaps, less well adapted to the treatment of contemporary subjects. Since Dr. Chiu was instrumental in developing this classi- fication scheme, his name became closely associated with its broader title, "Harvard- Yenching Library . Scheme." Thus when Tsuen-hsuin Tsien conducted his survey on East Asian collections in America in 1965, he referred to this system simply as the "Chiu scheme. "6 As the availability of the Library of Con- gress printed catalog cards increased, bear- ing LC classification numbers, more and more of the newly established small and medium-sized East Asian collections, which had used the Harvard- Y enching scheme, shifted to the LC system. However, seven of a dozen major collections with more than 60 percent of the total resources of East Asian collections in the United States have kept their classification scheme unchanged. The major East Asian collections using the Harvard-Y enching Library scheme are the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Hoover Institution, and Princeton University. 7 Chinese or Oriental collections outside the United States that are using the Harvard- Yenching classification include the Austra- lian National Library; Australian National University; Bibliotheque Nationale; Ham- burg University; the University of Malaya; Sinological Institute, Lei den; Oxford U ni- versity; Yenching Collection of the Peking University; and the University of Singapore. While it is true that the number of librar- ies using the Harvard-Y enching scheme is decreasing, the number of books cataloged by that scheme continues to increase. 8 Thus the importance of Chiu' s Harvard- Yen- ching scheme for the future cannot be ig- nored.9 Early in 1885 the Transliteration Commit- tee of the American Library Association is- sued a report on romanization in library cataloging. Subsequently, in 1908, the 386 I C allege & Research Libraries • September 1978 Anglo-American Code was compiled by committees of the Library Association and the American Library Association, adopting the romanization rules. The first romanized catalog of a Chinese and Japanese collection came into being at the Harvard-Yenching Library in 1928. Dr. Chiu introduced the use of romanization on catalog cards written in Chinese characters, and this has become the standard form in all American librar- ies. 10 He was, indeed, the first librarian to apply modern library techniques to classify- ing and cataloging Chinese and Japanese materials in American libraries. Among Dr. Chiu' s other achievements are his personal involvement in building East Asian libraries at Harvard University, at the University of Minnesota, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. HARVARD-YEN CHING INSTITUTE As a result of his work at Harvard, Dr. Chiu became involved in developing what was to become the library of the Harvard- y enching Institute-an independent corpo- ration created to promote higher education in East Asian affairs on the Cambridge campus. He was officially appointed the in- stitute's first librarian in 1931. During the next thirty-five years, he singlehandedly built this collection into the largest and best among all East Asian collections in Ameri- can university libraries. He had the opportunity to visit all the important East Asian collections in Europe. He further visited and studied the catalog- ing systems of the major libraries in China and reorganized the cataloging and classi- fication system of the Yenching University Library in Peking. At the Harvard-Y enching Library, he Was able to draw upon these experiences in developing a catalog, printed in both book and card form, which was sold to libraries in China, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Through his many personal contacts and unceasing efforts, he was able to build the collection from fewer than 7,000 volumes in 1931 to as many as 400,000 at the time of his retirement in 1965. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA Retirement from Harvard was by no means a signal that Dr. Chiu was ready to give up his energetic lifework or his love of libraries. In July 1965 he joined the staff of the University of Minnesota Library at Minneapolis as consultant and was respon- sible for establishing a new East Asian library. His life in Minnesota was no different from that of the old Harvard days. Working as diligently as a man in his thirties, he par- ticipated in every detail of the library's operation-from negotiations to acquire pri- vate book collections in Paris to the marking technique on book spines. In the area of collection development, Dr. Chiu first de- termined the objectives of the library, set up' book selection guidelines, and finally worked out strategies for acquiring mate- rials. He indicated that an acquisitions pol- icy should reflect the educational needs, subject emphases, regional conditions, and long-range plans of a particular library. His policy was based on his professional judgment, together with subject bibliog- raphies, reference works, catalogs, and book lists of other libraries. He also considered the recommendations of faculty, staff, and other clientele. A desiderata list of specific subject materials was compiled. In this manner, he was able to obtain the most wanted items and use funds efficiently. While favoring the acquisition of valuable duplicates from other libraries, he also realized that the purchase of scholars' pri- vate collections is the most economical way to acquire good quality books. 11 With his expertise and experience the li- brary was able to develop from a very small nucleus into a solid collection in the lan- guage-subject area within just one year. This was to lay the groundwork for an in- creasing flow of teaching and research in Chinese and Japanese studies in the north- em United States. The East Asian library of the University of Minnesota now constitutes one of the richest resources of its kind in the Midwest and has served as a model for developing new area studies libraries else- where in the United States . CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG At the age of 68, Dr. Chiu accepted an even more challenging job-that of .creating a larger library for a larger academic com- munity. The job meant building his third Chiu and Chinese Anterican Librarianship I 387 Harvard -Yenching Library, Cambridge , Massach usetts Alfred Kaiming Chiu, 1898-1977 library. This time he traveled to Hong Kong to create a central library facility for a newly established federation of colleges in the British colony-the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Again he participated in every aspect of development-from choosing the library's site to the building's design and from policy formulation to daily operation. As a result of Dr. Chiu' s efforts, the hold- ings of this library grew rapidly over a pe- riod of four years. Today the library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong houses one of the largest and best Chinese collec- tions in Asia outside of Japan, Taiwan, and the mainland of China. Returning to the United States in 1970, Dr. Chiu resumed his lifework at the Harvard-Yenching Library, where as consul- tant on Chinese rare books he worked at least four hours a day examining, describ- ing, and classifying the centuries-old vol- umes he previously acquired for the library. TRAINING OF LIBRARIANS AND RESEARCH Another of Dr. Chiu's accomplishments has been the training of young Chi~ese American librarians. In the 1930s he brought a group of young librarians with expertise in Sinology from China to the Harvard-Y enching Library for training and work. Some of them have been instrumen- tal in developing East Asian collections throughout the United States. Chinese American librarians who worked with Dr. Chiu at the Harvard-Yenching Li- brary included Chaoying Fang of Columbia University, Liang Hsii of the Library of Congress, James S. K. Tung of PrincetQn University, and Zunvair Yue, Kai-hsien Liu, and Daisy J . Tao of the Harvard-Y enching library. Last but not least among Dr. Chiu' s con- tributions as a Chinese American librarian are his many academic and professional publications. A bibliography of his pub- lished works compiled in 1965 lists fifty titles. 12 His monumental work, A Classifica- tion Scheme for Chinese and Japanese Books, was published by the American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, D.C. in 1943. His Cataloguing Rules for Chinese Books, published in 1931 by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, has been used as a textbook by library schools and as a working tool by librarians throughout China. His articles dealing with Far Eastern librarianship have appeared in such profes- sional journals as ALA Bulletin, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Library Journal, and Library Quarterly. In March 1976 Dr. Chiu presented a paper entitled "Chinese Rare Books in the Harvard-Yenching Library" at the 28th an- nual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto. This paper shed new light on connoisseurship and on the subject of pan pen hsueh, a traditional Chinese study of editions and printing. It also of- fered useful information on the history and growth of the Harvard-Yenching Library. Appropriately, in light of the above men- tioned need for biographies of librarians, he also wrote a biography of Mary Elizabeth Wood (1862-1931), the teacher of library science during his college years in Wuchang and the fourtder of the Boone Library School. 13 Alfred Kaiming Chiu often remarked somewhat ruefully that an academic librar- ian who is not a scholar risks the contempt of his colleagues on the faculty, while a li- 388 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 brarian whose greatest love is scholarly re- search will probably neglect his respon- sibilities as a librarian. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of his career was his suc- cessful balancing of these potentially con- tradictory elements. Thus he was not only a distinguished librarian but, at the same time, a scholar's scholar and a librarian's librarian-and, above all, a whole and very human person. REFERENCES 1. Jesse H. Shera, "The Literature of American Library History," Library Quarterly 15:1-24 Qan. 1945). 2. Edward G. Holley, "Librarians, 1876-1976," Library Trends 25:199 Quly 1976). 3. For biographical information on Chinese stu- dents in American library schools during the 1920s to 1950s, see Chih-chun (Tien) Au; "American Impact on Modern Chinese Li- brary Development" (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Chicago, 1964), p.27-40. 4. A summary of Dr. Chiu' s professional con- tributions can be found in Shih-kang Tung, "A Tribute to Alfred K'aiming Ch'iu," T'u shu kuan hsueh pao (Journal of Library Sci- ence) 7:1-3 (July 1965), and Eugene W. Wu, "A. Kaiming Chiu, 1898-1977, A Memorial," Committee on East Asian Libraries Bulletin 54:i-ii (Nov. 1977). The March 1978 Commit- tee on East Asian Libraries Bulletin (no.55) was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Chiu and includes numerous memorial articles in tribute to him. 5. A summary of Dr. Chiu' s life and activities from the early 1910s to the late 1930s can be found in his speech, "Reminiscences of a Li- brarian," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25:7-15 (1964-65). 6. Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, "East Asian Collections in America," in Area Studies and the Library, the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School, May 20--22, 1965 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1966), p.58-- 73. 7. For statistical information see Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Current Status of East Asian Collec- tions in American Libraries, 1974/75 (Wash- ington, D.C.: Center for Chinese Research Materials, Association of Research Libraries, 1976), p.16-17. 8. Remarks made by Dr. Chiu at a library busi- ness meeting of the 24th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, New York, New Yorl<, March 27, 1972. 9. For a discussion of the Harvard-Yenching li- brary classification scheme, see Elling 0. Eide, "Methods in Sinology: Problems of Teaching and Learning," Journal of Asian Studies 31:131-41 (Nov. 1971). 10. During recent years the advantages of using romanization systems in nonroman language material cataloging has been questioned. See C. Sumner Spalding, "Rornanization Reexam- ined," Library Resources & Technical Ser- vices 21:3-12 (Winter 1977). 11. Information gathered from Dr. Chiu's reports to the director of the University of Minnesota libraries, 1965-:66. 12. "Bibliography of the Works of Dr. A. K'aim- ing Ch'iu," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25:16-18 (1964-65). Two major items should be added to the bibliography: "Ssu k'u shih shou Ming tai lei shu k'ao (Ming En- cyclopedias and Reference Works Unre- corded in the Ssu k'u ch'iian shu tsung mu)," Hsiang-kang Chung wen ta hsueh Chung-kuo wen hua yen chiu so hsueh pao (Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 2:43-58 (1969), and with Tsu-hui Li, Hsiang-kang Chung wen ta hsueh ta hsueh chi ko hsueh yuan t'u shu kuan ts'ang ch'i k'an lien ho mu lu (Union Catalogue of Serials in the Central and College Libraries of the Chinese U niver- sity of Hong Kong) [Hong Kong, 1969]). 13. "Mary Elizabeth Wood," in Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (Cam- bridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1971) 3:647-48. Miss Wood's biography can also be found in George W. Huang, "Miss Mary Elizabeth Wood: Pioneer of the Library Movement in China," Journal of Library & Information 'Science (Tu shu kuan hsiieh yii tzu hsiin k'o hsiieh) 1:67-78 (April 1975).