Gift From Taiwan Gives Asians Access to Far East Authors : Monterey Park: Bruggemeyer Memorial Library is subscribing to a computer network that will allow it to search for books in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Librarians soon will be able to search for titles, authors’ names and subjects on a computer screen--in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

With a $20,000 gift from the Taiwan chapter of Lions Club International, Bruggemeyer Memorial Library is subscribing to an on-line computer network that will allow it to share information about its Asian book collections with libraries and universities around the world.

The network is provided by Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit organization that enables libraries to store bibliographical information, borrow books from other libraries, and even print and sort their own card catalogues.

“This will benefit the surrounding libraries as well,” said Christina Yueh, a senior librarian. “If we have the system, we can share it with them.”

Andrew Wang, who directs the library center’s Asian/Pacific Services, said 10,000 libraries in 39 countries subscribe to the English-language network. The Asian-language network, however, is used mainly by scholars in 30-40 large universities with extensive collections from East Asian countries, including Harvard, UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Monterey Park will be only the second city, behind Chicago, to join the Asian program, Wang said. When the system is installed, librarians will be able to scan the entire collection of the National Center Library in Taipei, Taiwan.

And in several years, they’ll have access to a catalogue of all the works written in mainland China from 1911-1949, Wang said.

The National Library of China in Beijing has signed an agreement with the library center to provide a complete bibliography of about 120,000 works from that period, beginning with the rise of the Kuomintang Party and ending when the Chinese Communist Party took over.

Yueh said the computer program also will simplify the tedious task of handprinting all of the library’s 20,000 Chinese titles and filing them in the card catalogue. Because of the time it takes to copy and file information by subject, author and title, more than half of the Chinese collection isn’t even included in the catalogue, Yueh said.

Officials said Monterey Park will have to pay several thousand dollars for the system each subsequent year, the exact amount depending on usage.