UCSD Making Book on Pacific Rim Library

Professor Tun-jen Cheng’s request for materials for his class at UC San Diego’s school on the Pacific Rim surprised even the specialized librarians hired to build a first-class collection for the new graduate institution.

Cheng wanted Chinese specialist Richard Wang to come up with an internal newsletter circulated among the six major textile trading groups in Asia. It is not commercially available because it contains information key to the industry’s inner workings, especially pricing.

Using contacts that he has built over more than two decades, Wang got in touch with a college classmate from Asia who is now a successful businessman with connections to textile traders. The friend warned that the newsletter could be obtained “only with great difficulty.”

“If you really want it, let us see,” Wang was told.

Interesting Challenges

The newsletter is one of the few requests so far that Wang and his colleagues have been unable to fulfill for the faculty from the UCSD Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, which opened last September.

But as important “fugitive literature,” in the parlance of librarians, the document illustrates the tasks facing the handpicked staff in building a collection to parallel the strengths of a unique school that already is developing a reputation both in the United States and across the Pacific. The school is designed to train students for careers in international affairs, from banking to government policy planning to journalism.

The challenges involve intricate detective work as well as prosaic library activity, including location of items such as Japanese-language reports on Costa Rican investment, anti-U.S. trade diatribes by Japanese farmers, and economic missives prepared for top Chinese government officials.

“They can’t do everything at once, but they’ve done an excellent job so far,” said Lawrence Krause, an expert on Pacific trade and economics who left the prestigious Brookings Institution think tank in Washington to become one of the school’s first professors. “But for me, the real thrill will come (next year) when we move into our own permanent building.”

“This is not an orientalia library in any sense,” William Tuchrello, the head librarian for the new school, said. “Most (university) East Asian libraries have emphasized history and literature. We are narrowly focused, more hard-core social sciences, economics, business and international relations.”

As such, the new library has had to start pretty much from scratch, although it has been able to call upon existing small collections in the UCSD central library for undergraduate Chinese, Japanese and Latin American studies programs.

“We’re working in areas that we’ve never done research in before,” Dorothy Gregor, UCSD university librarian, said. “And in putting things together, that meant people had to come before books. We needed to hire top librarians and especially language experts.”

Gregor recruited Tuchrello from the U.S. Library of Congress, where he had headed the division on Indochina, Thailand and Burma for more than a decade. She enticed Wang from his position with the University of Minnesota where he had worked for almost a quarter-century building its East Asia library.

And Gregor lured Eiji Yutani from his post as head of Japanese collections with UC Berkeley’s East Asian library, considered by many scholars to be the nation’s finest general collection in that field.

Laying the Foundation

“The challenge is to lay the foundation for a new research center on the West Coast,” Yutani said, adding with a smile, “and they made me a generous offer.”

Indeed, Gregor said that she went about recruitment of the top staffers similar to the way the school’s dean, Peter Gourevich, has sought top Pacific Rim scholars from Berkeley, Yale and other leading universities.

“The only thing I would say is that (recruitment) took us longer than we wanted,” she said.

Now, the staff is setting out on a complex path for collecting books and manuscripts that offers twists and turns to test the skills of even the most experienced librarians.

“Take Latin America, an area in which we have a strong collection because of our established Latin American studies program,” Tuchrello said. “But it’s not good in terms of the cutting edge of business (materials). And for data on companies across the border, you can’t just go to bookstores or to magazines. You need the primary documents themselves and that will often mean going to the countries to get them ourselves.”

In many cases, however, such documents either do not exist or have been prepared in forms difficult for researchers to use without extensive reworking or interpretation. Tuchrello has contacted finance ministries and universities throughout Latin America and has hired a Spanish journalist on sabbatical at UCSD, Pilar Laguna, to help with the correspondence.

“If we write a letter in English, the (institution) writes back in English, but if we write in Spanish, we hear back in Spanish and, in some cases, with a completely different letter than what they said in English (when first contacted),” Tuchrello said.

“We’re beginning to get some materials but often the institutions, especially the Mexican ones, are embarrassed at how it looks,” he said.

Contacts Important

The importance of personal contacts applies even more so to Asia, the librarians said.

Wang and Yutani have extensive personal relationships with officials built up over many years of seeking out materials.

Wang faces unique problems in attempting to put together the first comprehensive collection on modern Chinese business and industry at any institution. Much information collected routinely in the United States or Japan often does not exist in readily available form or is considered confidential by the Chinese government.

“It is so difficult to get information out of a socialist state that is also highly bureaucratic,” Wang said. But he hopes within three years to have built a solid base in materials about modern Chinese industrialization.

“A lot of Chinese (academic) institutions are trying to do the same thing that we are, to study data, and they are more than willing to share information (back-and-forth) with us,” Wang said.

Yutani has a different set of hurdles. There is a wealth of data about Japan, and the Berkeley collection which Yutani oversaw has the largest number of Japanese government and corporate documents in the United States.

“I can’t duplicate such a large collection,” Yutani said. “Rather, I want to focus on a few elite Japanese institutions (with emphasis on materials in) the social science field.”

Yutani would like to set up a number of exchange programs with leading universities in Tokyo and Kyoto, as well as with the ministries of finance and trade.

“It’s very important, for example, that we could get their conference papers and research papers before publication,” Yutani said. Such manuscripts are vital to researchers working on contemporary issues since the wait for official publication of conference and other research documents often extends from three to five years.

In addition, Tuchrello said that professors in countries with state-planned economies are often more forthcoming in conference papers than in official publications that have been reviewed by government authorities.

Outside Normal Channels

“These guys (Wang and Yutani) are very well-connected and can really help in going outside of normal library channels, which often just won’t work with things we need to get,” Tuchrello said.

Tuchrello recalled a meeting last year with the assistant manager of the Japan Trading Corp., a large exporter of publications. At first, the manager made a “ho-hum” response to Tuchrello’s explanations about the new library and its need for cooperation from Asian sources, he said.

“But when I told him that we had hired Mr. Yutani from Berkeley, his eyes lit up,” Tuchrello said.

The library expects eventually to become a center for research for scholars from elsewhere doing work on Pacific Rim topics. In part, the school’s faculty will generate original material from its own research. The library will also acquire one-of-a-kind collections on the Pacific area, such as a large collection of books and manuscripts in Hong Kong for which it is bidding. And it recognizes the opportunity to develop a large body of information on maquiladora plants, the joint ventures between Mexico and American or Asian corporations to set up factories along the U.S.-Mexican border.

In addition, given the growing importance of electronic data bases, data services librarian Jim Jacobs is talking with institutions around the Pacific about a joint computerized business data system that would specialize in Asian business statistics.

All of these efforts take money, Gregor emphasized. And while the library has been given more money than would ordinarily be the case--based on UC systemwide funding formulas--the current $500,000 annual budget does not go as far as scholars would like.

“It’s not a lot, but considering that under UC funding formulas we ordinarily would not have received even that amount, it’s adequate,” Gregor said.

A Slow Process

Faculty members have been understanding in realizing they cannot have all the materials at once, Tuchrello said.

Dean Peter Gourevich said that there is a broad consensus among professors about which basic materials to buy first, particularly those needed by graduate students working toward their master’s degree. Some faculty members have even promised to donate part of their personal collections to the library once the permanent building is completed in the fall of 1989.

“Where there is less agreement involves purchase of specialized materials for individual professors and for Ph.D. candidates,” Gourevich said.

“Ultimately, we need to double the amount of money we spend,” Tuchrello said. “And we must rely on the faculty to help us to write grants to obtain additional monies.”

Professor Krause agreed, saying that most professors recognize the need to go outside the university for additional money. Krause already has begun working on the Pacific Rim Financial Forum, a mix of private businessmen, public officials and university researchers from around the nation who will meet twice a year or so to talk about research topics under way at the school that are of interest to forum members.

Tuchrello would like to involve San Diego-area companies as well, given the region’s growing links to Asia and its Pacific location. However, he admits to some dismay at the lack of strong enthusiasm so far among local concerns.

“This school can be beneficial to San Diego companies in becoming more export-oriented, and the library in particular can provide good data bases to build on,” Tuchrello said. “But San Diego does not have a history of major libraries, unlike major cities in the East, and people aren’t aware yet of what we can do.”