Home > Journals > JEAL > No. 175 (2022)

A Reflection on the Challenges and Collaborative Potential in Working with Buddhist Studies Materials in East Asian Librarianship

Matthew Hayes, Duke UniversityFollow

Keywords

Buddhist Studies, Reference work, Collections Building, Research Advising, Collaboration

Abstract

This article explores a set of shared challenges that tend to emerge for East Asian Librarians in working with Buddhist studies materials. It outlines how Buddhist linguistic conventions can give rise to an unpredictability in reference work, how its historical textual practices can complicate collections development, and how Buddhist temple archive management can make traditional approaches to research advising unreliable. It also proposes that these challenges provide distinct opportunities for collaboration across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean areas of bibliographic coverage. These challenges offer a chance for librarians to work together and develop a standard, field-wide toolset for working with these multilingual, multicultural, and transhistorical materials, especially as they interact with other sub-disciplines within the broader field of East Asian studies. The solutions proposed here are initial in scope and may provide a point of departure for broader conversations on collaborative opportunities between librarians covering China, Japan, and Korea.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Hayes, Matthew (2022) "A Reflection on the Challenges and Collaborative Potential in Working with Buddhist Studies Materials in East Asian Librarianship," Journal of East Asian Libraries: Vol. 2022: No. 175, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jeal/vol2022/iss175/3