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Report on the 1st International Conference on Universal Digital Library

(Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2005, Hangzhou) and on Workshops at Tsinghua University Library (Nov. 2-5, 2005, Beijing)

Karen Calhoun, Janet McCue, and Xin Li

“In heaven there is paradise, and on earth there is Hangzhou”—Chinese Saying

When Xin Li and I first learned about the First International Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL), to be held in Hangzhou, China, last fall, we knew we wanted to go. Xin would have a chance to make her first presentation in China as a librarian, as well as to drop in on family members, and I was looking forward to returning to mainland China to see what’s changed since 2003. Each of us submitted proposals for conference papers, and, to our delight, both were accepted. (You can learn about the conference at its Web site, where you can take a look at our and others’ presentations).

Hangzhou, a beautiful city known as one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, is also famous for its silk. Although the conference allowed scant opportunity for visiting or shopping, on the day before, Xin and I were able to squeeze in a quick visit to the Silk Museum and the silk market and brief reunions with friends made when Teresa Mei and I visited Hangzhou two years ago.

On the conference opening night, the ICUDL organizers treated us to a spectacular evening show by the dancers and acrobats of Song Dynasty Town, a kind of cultural theme park.

The conference site—the two-year old Zijingang campus of Zhejiang University—is the newest addition to the university’s facilities for its 50,000 students. It is astonishing to me that construction of this campus, with its ultramodern buildings and open landscapes, was barely begun when I was in China in 2003. The new campus is a fitting symbol for the new, fast-moving China of the twenty-first century.

Like Janet, who tells her story just below, we met former friends and colleagues and encountered many new ones—especially Xin, who became fondly known by the younger conference organizers as “sister.” Little did we know how important Xin’s prior experience as a professional translator would be. Read on to learn why.

The World Is Flat and Filled with Talented and Caring People

Janet McCue

Unlike Xin and Karen, I had never been to China, but after my first trip, I know I’d like to return. I traveled to China as part of the team associated with the Million Book Project (MBP), whose meeting was held in conjunction with the ICUDL conference at Zhejiang University. The MBP is an international project with partners in India, China, Egypt, and the United States. Although one of the goals is to digitize a million books by 2007, it is also tackling thorny research questions related to OCR for Indian and Arabic languages and scripts, automatic summarization, machine analysis of calligraphic scripts, etc.

Xin Li, Janet McCue, and Karen Calhoun at the conference

My travels began and ended in Shanghai, where I spent the weekend with a group from Carnegie Mellon University. As our bodies caught up with the time difference, we toured beautiful gardens and Buddhist monasteries tucked in corners of the city, as well as water villages that conjured up visions of eighteenth-century China. Shanghai is full of skyscrapers, and the city is growing at a ferocious rate, but adjacent to the high-end shopping areas where the prices are labeled, there are still large marketplaces where bargaining is the only way to go.

On Monday we traveled to Hangzhou for the ICUDL that Xin and Karen described. In addition to attending the conference, I attended the meetings associated with the Million Book Project. The MBP is the brainchild of Professor Raj Reddy, of Carnegie Mellon University. Funded initially by the National Science Foundation, the MBP has also received substantial support from the governments of China, India, and Egypt. Approximately 600,000 books have been scanned, predominately at scanning centers in India and China. The conference and the MBP meeting provided an opportunity not only to summarize the progress made in the digitizing effort, but also for talented programmers and librarians from around the world to describe technical achievements related to the MBP, including parsing Arabic script so that it can be OCR’d and transliteration schemes that could be used for the many different languages spoken in India. These are only a few of the intellectual challenges posed by the MBP; there are other technical, political, and cultural challenges as well—including sending books and files between China and the United States!

The scope of the digital MBP collection is very broad, but recently the team has decided to focus on agricultural materials. Cornell has been asked to coordinate this effort, and we will work with the National Agricultural Library, the FAO library, and other land-grant institutions to develop the agricultural collections in MBP. Given that we have a head start with the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) and Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, and History (HEARTH) and the collaborative National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) preservation grants, the MBP program should be an exciting initiative that will enhance our digital collections and provide valuable information to researchers around the world.

In addition to the many talented researchers I met at the conference, I also met many caring individuals. Usually, at an international conference one gets to sample the food, the culture, and the scenery, but I also got to sample the medical system. Unfortunately for me, I left for China feeling under the weather and soon got worse. Although I would have preferred being healthy during my trip, being sick gave me an intriguing glimpse at the medical system in China. I was treated by exceptionally caring doctors at the university clinic and again at the Hangzhou Hospital, which coincidentally had a partnership with Loma Linda University, in California. But my colleague, Xin Li (who now knows how much I weigh, when I was born, and my entire health history) was extremely kind and wonderfully helpful. The reason why her smiling face was not in the group photo taken at the conference was that she so thoughtfully insisted that she accompany me through the medical system. Xin was wonderful not only because she could translate the language for me, but because she could also straddle the world of Eastern and Western medicine. My health needs also demanded that Xin work behind the scenes with many of the young conference organizers, and thus Xin became known to them as “sister.” The world is flat, and it is full of incredibly talented and thoughtful people.

Conference organizers

With Friends and Colleagues at Tsinghua University Library

Karen Calhoun and Xin Li

Mrs. Guo Yiqun, the deputy director of the reference department at Tsinghua University Library, also attended the ICUDL conference, and as Janet was preparing to return home, Mrs. Guo, Xin, and I boarded a plane for Beijing. At the Hangzhou airport, our little trio rewarded ourselves with some enormous bowls of noodles.

Karen Calhoun with Mrs. Guo

The trip to Tsinghua was a whirlwind visit, in which Xin and I gave five workshops in a day and a half. We began with “director’s cut” versions of our ICUDL papers—but with a twist—Xin gave her paper in Chinese instead of English, and she translated mine as I gave it.

Karen Calhoun and Xin Li in front of the Tsinghua Library

That afternoon I delivered (and Xin translated) a workshop on fast cataloging that I’d prepared at deputy director Zhao Xiong’s request. Some of you will remember Mr. Zhao, who, with his colleague Chen Wu, spent about a month at Cornell in fall 2004. In the evening Mr. Zhao and his wife collected Xin and me, a number of other Tsinghua library friends, and Teresa Mei for a feast of many scrumptious dishes at a Beijing restaurant. (Yes, Teresa is spending the fall semester in Tsinghua while her husband is teaching there.) Several CUL staff members have met the individuals in the photo below: Mr. Zhao’s wife, Teresa, and I are in the front row, and Mr. Zhao, Xin, “Jo” Hong and her husband, and Zhao Chengang and his wife are in the back row. Chen Wu and his wife were behind the camera.

Banquet with Mr. Zhao and friends

The next day, since Tsinghua Library was recently given an empty warehouse off campus by the university and is thus interested in remote storage, Xin gave a new workshop, again in Chinese, complete with dozens of digital photos, describing the Annex, its equipment, workflows, and storage methods. According to Tsinghua colleagues, there is not yet a high-density, environmentally controlled library storage facility in China. I followed up with a workshop on topics related to electronic resources—a topic I’d addressed two years ago when I first visited Tsinghua. Shortly before leaving the States, I’d surfed the Tsinghua library’s Web site to see what sort of progress they’d made in the past two years. It is impressive how rapidly the Tsinghua staff have learned and implemented new interface designs and access methods. I’d prepared a menu of possible topics for the e-resources workshop; among the topics they chose to cover were e-resource management systems and linking users to library sites from hits on Google and other open Web search engines. Thanks to Xin, the language barrier was as low as it has ever been. We left Tsinghua feeling that our efforts to prepare the workshops had been richly rewarded.

That afternoon Ms. Zhuang Mei and Jo Hong accompanied me on a short walk at the Summer Palace, while Xin visited family in Beijing. On the last morning, Jo Hong and her husband picked us up for a madcap dash along Beijing’s premier shopping street, called Wangfujing Dajie. Following still another yummy lunch, during which I snapped this photo of Jo and her husband’s beautiful new Chinese lantern, we headed for the airport and home.