Category Archives: Archive

Hurricane Sandy Highlights the Problems of Digital Archives

Source: hyperallergic.com by Kyle Chayka on November 20, 2012

Jonathan Minard’s documentary of Eyebeam’s recovery efforts (Screen capture by Hyperallergic)

The damage from Sandy’s flooding took Chelsea galleries by surprise. The swelling water knocked artworks from walls and poured into basement storage areas, where art spaces and artists alike often store the work that’s not on display. Zach Feuer Gallery’s sloped space meant that water washed directly toward fragile work. Printed Matter encountered a similar issue, with soaked stock going to waste on the sidewalk. But it wasn’t only physical property that was damaged in the hurricane.

Eyebeam, the new media-focused nonprofit that takes its home in a cavernous Chelsea warehouse extremely close to the water, got hit hard by Sandy. The water line on the inside of the building rose to three feet, and portions of the interior walls had to be removed. But the real damage wasn’t necessarily to architecture but to the space’s archives, which were stored on supposedly stable media formats like DVDs, harddrives, and tapes.

The salt content and the toxicity of the water that came into the building corrupted everything it touched. Years and years of exhibition records, files, and media-driven artist projects were put at risk. Though we think of digital creations as somehow non-physical entities, most of these works were made in the pre-cloud era, and stored as extremely physical things vulnerable to physical problems. The digital isn’t so digital any more when the metal computer tower files reside in is getting eaten away by chemicals. Eyebeam had to go into crisis mode.

Teams of conservators gathered and volunteered to clean, as best they could, the media storage formats that formed Eyebeam’s artistic and curatorial heritage. New media documentarian and Eyebeam resident Jonathan Minard participated in the efforts, and published a short video showing the problems the institution now faces.

Minard also gave Hyperallergic this stirring description of what happened:

Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology resides on the corner of the Westside Highway and 21st street in Chelsea, a neighborhood shared with New York’s most prestigious contemporary art galleries that we now know to be a flood zone.

After Sandy, as the floodwaters receded, Eyebeam’s staff and residents joined to assess the damage.

A record storm surge had swept through the building, leaving three feet of saltwater mixed with sewage and chemicals, claiming over $250,000 worth of AV equipment, computers, and books.

Among the wreckage, an archive of analog and digital media chronicling Eybeam’s 15 years of experimental art and technology had been kept in storage on the first floor. As an artist-in-residence working on a documentary about digital archiving, I had recently participated in conversations with the community about how to digitize this collection to preserve Eyebeam’s history.

Disaster became the impetus. Our organizations’ long-delayed plans to secure a collection stored on unstable formats now had critical urgency.

Kara Van Malssen and Chris Lacinak, media conservation professionals from AudioVisual Media Preservation Solutions, and Eric Piil from Anthology Film Archive, arrived the scene, helping us to implement a system for stabilizing 1,275 items. By promoting our triage effort through social media, we mobilized a volunteer army of archivists including students from NYU’s MIAP program, conservators from MoMA, Rhizome and Heritage Preservation.

In less than two weeks, we have inventoried all the submerged DVDs, VHS and Beta cassettes, Mini DVs, and digital storage media in preparation for transfer to servers. We hope to make the entire collection accessible online in the coming years, working with AudioVisual Preservation Solutions to develop a strategy for the long term preservation of our work, ensuring that the best practices of archiving become ingrained in the culture of Eyebeam.

We hope Eyebeam’s recovery will offer a lesson for other institutions, to secure their archives before the event of a natural disaster or gradual obsolescence renders their media inaccessible.

This story will become part of Archive: a compendium of short documentaries about archiving culture in the Internet age, and the challenges of massive digital storage.

Eyebeam has also opened an online pledge drive to help fund recovery.

Water Curse or Blessing!? Exhibit

Water Curse or Blessing?! is an exhibition traveling to Phnom Penh from Berlin, Germany for the Our City Festival. The project brings together voices from the Asia-Pacific region to reflect on the issues of water and the environmental and social impact. The exhibition presents 25 infrastructural, architectural, planning, and artistic projects with exemplary local, problem-orientated solutions which have been implemented in China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Emirates, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Australia.

A workshop parallels the exhibition and features dialogues between exhibiting designers and architects from the Asia-Pacific region and Cambodian architecture/arts students and professionals. Exhibition and workshops are curated and implemented by Manolis House in collaboration with the festival.

Here is the website from the original Aedes exhibition. Thank you to the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their support of this project.

The challenge of this exhibit was that the original work, sent to us via PDF – in English and German – needed to be combined with the Khmer translation and installed in a space large enough to accomodate the 27 panels (1 m x .8 m). In the original exhibitions the panels were installed on the wall. However, here we re-conceived of them as boxes and installing them in the garden of No Problem Park, a French Colonial era villa – with the intent of making them more accessible to the public than they would be in a typical gallery space.

Our City Festival

Our City Festival photos by Vin Dao.

 

Climates of Migration

Source: climatesofmigration.org

Historical Intersections of Climate Change and Environmental Migrations

The three-year research project Climates of Migration is a common project of The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen (KWI), generously funded by the German federal Ministry of Education and Research. The project looks at the historical intersections between environmental change and migration and is particularly interested in climate-induced movements of people in the past. Six individual projects consisting out of four dissertations and two post-doctoral projects, will shed light on how, where, and why people migrated as a result of droughts, cold periods, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme natural events.

The team will also develop a chronological database CLIMMIGRATION.dat with examples of environmental migration in the last 500 years, weighing the social and environmental factors that played a role. Both individual research and the collaborative project will focus on three main thematic areas: Climates of Famine, Climates of Colonisation, and Disaster Migration.

  • Climates of Famine
    Research in this area aims to analyze how climate and climate change have triggered famine in the past. Using famine theories, climate reconstructions and ethnohistoric methods, projects will look at the correlation between the environment and migration from a “push” perspective and with respect to adaptation strategies.
  • Famine in Ireland caused massive migration
  • Climates of Colonization
    Rather than focusing on migration as an effect of environmental/climate change, this thematic area questions what it means to experience climate change as an effect of migration, and what influence this has on a communities social and political practice. It aims to find out how social assumptions about the climate-culture nexus organized and legitimized social hierarchies in colonial times.\
  • Disaster Migration
    This thematic area explores sudden rather than long-term environmental stressors, such as floods, hurricanes, landslides and earthquakes. Such severe natural events very often destroy livelihoods and thus turn into catastrophes, forcing people to move. The question arises, when exactly does their dispacement exactly turn into migration. The answer depends on a variety of contextual factors, such as individual, social, and cultural coping capacities; the situation at the origin; and the destination of these “refugees.” Research in this area thus not only takes into account the events themselves, but also (long-term) patterns of vulnerability and resilience.

The project members have organized several small research workshops with leading scholars in the field such as:

In early August 2011, scholars from around the world gathered at the Internationales Begegnungszentrum in Munich for the first of three international conferences of the Climates of Migration project. The main and most important result of this conference was the insight that “environmental migration” is a much more complex and ambivalent phenomenon than usually acknowledged. The sixteen individual presentations highlighted the diversity of the migration/environment nexus in different places at different times. Case studies from Alaska, India, Bolivia, Australia, and many other places emphasized how environmental factors often played an important part in individual decisions to move or migrate. In most cases these environmental reasons were, however, accompanied by deliberations on social, economic, ethnic or cultural grounds.

Results
After three years the case studies and individual projects will be summarized and analyzed in a synthesis study, which will give insight in the dynamics, characteristics and diversity of the phenomena of environmental migration. The research results will be published and presented digitally in the database CLIMMIGRATION.dat, explained with a non-deterministic model for the description of the relation between climate and migration. It will take the social, political and ecological components of human interaction into account; balancing societal and natural environmental factors to overcome the dualism between natural and social science.

A rich overview of case studies will serve scientists and scholars with ideas for potential future research. The project findings will give an important insight in climatically induced migration. The results of the research project will contribute to the improvement of scenario building on climate impact research and environmental migration.

Phnom Penh Maps Held Hostage!

French Quarter Wander
Archives Map.

Perhaps I have idealistic notions about free and open access to information.
However, there are several things about the National Archives, which in my opinion, unnecessarily hinder access to information and thereby academic research:

_Monthly Research Fee: $15 foreigner ($1.25 for Khmer)

_Daily Item Limit: 10 items

_Hours: 8a-11am and 2pm-5pm (government hours)

_Cost of digitization**

While a research fee is pretty standard practice the digitization fees are absurd. **It is $50 to digitize one map = one digital photograph, as there are no large format scanners. For comparison: that’s 5x more than I paid in the States for a high resolution scan and 1/6 of my monthly rent in Phnom Penh. The librarian offered to charge me $30 if I brought my own camera. $30 to take one photo.

After speaking with other mapping and urban researchers it became apparent that each researcher is paying to photograph the same maps. There is no digital archive of the maps being produced out of this cost and effort… even though they have been digitized, some many times. This leaves individual researchers to distribute digital copies as they see fit. Why would the archive not want control of its digital collection?

Additionally, all documentation at the library is in French (and Khmer) such as the forms, brochures and card catalog. Which is technically fine since I can muddle through reading French. However, why is everything in French? Are the French still involved in the library and archives? Can I blame the French for the terrible prices? Understandably some of the historic maps are in French but why is a Cambodian archive still officially using French in the present day?

At times it seems that the online archives available in the States and elsewhere are far easier to use. Which undermines the argument for the necessity of in-country research:

_The Virtual Vietnam Archive http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/
_Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cambodia.html
_Historic Photos  http://belleindochine.free.fr/sommaire.htm
_Historic Photos  http://sea.lib.niu.edu/project/about_historical_photographs
_Documentation Center of Cambodia http://www.dccam.org/
_Cambodia at Cornell University http://seap.einaudi.cornell.edu/curriculum_cambodia

IMAG0064

Archived Map List

Documentation

Yale Genocide Program Maps

Source: http://www.yale.edu/cgp/maps.html

NEW: CGEO Mapping Database: A large interactive political, environmental and geographic map of the Cambodian war and genocide, 1965-2000.

Democratic Kampuchea Administrative Zones (official Khmer Rouge map, in Khmer) with description

DK Zones (English)

Provincial Genocide Sites (1975-1979)

Provincial Killing Fields: Directory for province links

Satellite Images

Satellite Images of Cambodia, 1973-1992

Composite Landsat satellite images of Cambodia, 1972-76, and 1990 with mass grave and prison sites from 1975-1979. Image information

Digital elevation map of Cambodia, 1990

Environmental Impact of Khmer Rouge Irrigation Projects (USGS satellite images)

Texas Tech Virtual Vietnam (and Cambodia) Library

Source: http://www.virtualarchive.vietnam.ttu.edu/

“The mission of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University is to support and encourage research and education regarding all aspects of the American Vietnam experience; promoting a greater understanding of this experience and the peoples and cultures of Southeast Asia. Its functions are threefold: support for the Vietnam Archive and the collection and preservation of pertinent historical source material; promotion of education through exhibits, classroom instruction, educational programs, and publications; and encouragement of related scholarship through organizing and hosting conferences and symposia, academic, educational, and cultural exchanges, and the publishing of scholarly research.”

They have maps of Cambodia:

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at UT Austin

Thanks Craig. Good stuff. Source: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cambodia.html

The following maps were produced by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, unless otherwise indicated.

Country Maps

City Maps

  • Batdambang (Battambang) original scale 1:12,500, Edition 1-TPC, Series L9010. U.S. Army Topographic Command, 1971 (6.1MB)
  • Kampong Chhnang and Vicinity original scale 1:12,500, Edition 1-DMATC, Series L9010. U.S. Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, Pictomap, 1971 (4.4MB)
  • Kampot original scale 1:12,500, Edition 2-AMS (FE), Series L9010. U.S. Army Mapping Service, Far East (3.3MB)
  • [Phnom Penh] Phnum Penh original scale 1:12,500, Edition 3-DMA, Series L9010. U.S. Defense Mapping Agency, 1971 (9.3MB)

 

Historical Maps

Thematic Maps

Topographic Maps

Then and Now: Historical Photographs of Cambodia

Source: http://belleindochine.free.fr/sommaire.htm
Source: http://sea.lib.niu.edu/project/about_historical_photographs

Then and Now: Historical Photographs of Cambodia is a project linking the history of Cambodia from the past to the present through photographs and descriptions. It is a collaborative project between Arizona State University Libraries and Northern Illinois University Libraries aimed at digitizing old photographs taken by Mimi Palgen Maisonneuve in the 1950s and 1960s and photographing the same locations to show contemporary Cambodian life in the year 2007.

The Palgen Photo Collection from the 1950s and 1960s offers a unique look at life in Cambodia from royal ceremonies to the rural life of commoners. This time period is significant because the images record life in Cambodia just prior to the beginning of hostilities that would lead to the Khmer Rouge period and the devastation of the entire Cambodian society. The contemporary photograph collection, taken in June and July 2007, contains pictures of village and rural scenes, everyday images of the urban lives of people in Phnom Penh, Kandal and Kampong Speu provinces, and historical monuments in Siem Reap province. The connection between these old and new photographs illustrates changes in village and urban life in Cambodia over these past few decades. Cambodia scholar and NIU Anthropologist, Judy Ledgerwood, along with Political Scientist, Kheang Un, coordinate this project for NIU with a graduate student in Anthropology at NIU, Pisith Phlong, as a research assistant. ASU Libraries’ Southeast Asia Bibliographer Christopher Miller coordinates work from ASU with Pamela Nguyen Corey as a research assistant.

Materials digitized under this project:

Rescued By Design

Source: New York Times
By 
Published: October 21, 201

ACHR BANG BUA CANAL: A renovated public walkway, top, along the canal in Bangkok, where residents are helping to design cleaner places to live.
I JOINED the line to get into the United Nations the other day, fiddling with my iPhone before shuffling through security. The couple in back (he was toting an iPad) mused about what a design guru Steve Jobs had been. They headed toward the information desk and I toward “Design With the Other 90 Percent: Cities,” an infelicitously titled but inspired show organized by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and now installed (since the museum is closed for renovations) in the United Nations visitors’ lobby.

Proyectos Arqui 5 CA Images from before and after a stair upgrade in La Vega, Caracas, Venezuela.

Jiko Ya Jamii KIBERA, NAIROBI, KENYA: A community cooker is fueled by refuse that residents collect in return for time using the oven.

Abir Abdullah/Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha BANGLADESH: One of Mohammed Rezwan’s floating community lifeboats that serve as schools, libraries and health clinics.

Vijay Gondi

PUNE, INDIA: In this booming city some schools come to the students: buses equipped with classrooms pick up the students where they live.

Medellín EDU, Alcaldía de Medellín, Metro de Medellín, and Center for Urban and Environmental Studies EAFIT MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA: This city’s worst slums have seen the development of a cable car system, libraries, parks, public schools and pedestrian walkways.

Prefeitura do Municipo de Diadema DIADEMA, BRAZIL: The two images of this industrial city outside São Paulo shows what came before, top, and after, below, a sweeping development.

Haas&Hahn A painting project has brought art to the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro.

Design shows may conjure up fizzy displays of Van Cleef & Arpels or stylish tributes to Helvetica and classic automobiles. Design implies for most people the beautiful things an affluent society makes for itself.

This show is not about that kind of design. The objects here tend to look rugged and sometimes embarrassingly simple, as in “Why hadn’t anyone come up with that idea before?” Their beauty lies elsewhere: in providing economical, smart solutions to address the problems of millions of the world’s poorest people.

If the genius of Mr. Jobs was giving us sleek and effortless products that answered questions consumers hadn’t thought to ask yet (can my mobile phone feature a speech-recognition system that reminds me to pick up my dry cleaning?), the designs in this case wrestle with what have long seemed intractable crises. I left stirred by how designers have tackled global pandemics like the proliferation of slums and the spread of infectious disease.

This is a design show about remaking the world, in other words. And that’s thrilling, whether it’s happening in Cupertino, Calif., or Uganda, where H.I.V. infects hundreds of people a day, and the latest news cellphone-wise has been the design and distribution of a text-messaging system that spreads health care information.

Text to Change, as the project is called, entails a collaboration by a pair of Dutch communication and technology specialists with local phone service providers and health care organizations. In Kibera, an area of Nairobi, Kenya, and one of the densest slums in Africa, the challenge was different. Traditional wood and charcoal fires cause rampant respiratory disease there. Refuse fills the streets. So a Nairobian architect designed a community cooker, fueled by refuse residents collect in return for time using the ovens.

From cellphones and cookers to cities: in Thailand, a public program called Baan Mankong Community Upgrading has, for the last eight years, been improving conditions in hundreds of that country’s 5,500 slums, bringing residents together with government and nongovernment agencies to design safer, cleaner places to live.

Along the Bang Bua Canal in Bangkok, where thousands of families have long squatted in rickety stilt houses linked by flimsy walkways, all teetering above polluted floodwater, architects from nearby Sripatum University were enlisted to devise row houses, detached houses and semidetached houses, along the lines of what residents said they wanted. Hundreds of decrepit stilt structures were demolished, new homes built in their stead, often from recycled doors and timber, on solid ground and near the former stilt houses, so that communities would not be broken up and families uprooted.

More than just upgrading housing and infrastructure, the strategy in Bang Bua included low-interest loans and renewable 30-year leases for slum residents, making them, for the first time, legal stakeholders in their properties. This helped to end the old cycle of evictions (in many slums around the world evictions are used to clear space for shopping malls and expressways) that left the poor in Bangkok perennially helpless and hopeless. With money from the loans, the residents of Bang Bua also decided to build a center for the elderly and disabled, and to set aside a fund for libraries, child care and school fees for the poorest families.

“It’s easy to build a house, much harder to build a community,” as Cynthia E. Smith, the show’s curator, told me. “Cities are very complex, and what the best designers illustrate is how to give form to sometimes very simple ideas. Good design involves bringing not just a fresh eye to problems but, most of all, listening to the people who live in those communities. We’re talking about a billion people living in informal settlements today,” she added. “You can see them as a billion problems or a billion solutions.”

This show follows a smaller one Ms. Smith organized in 2007 at the Cooper-Hewitt. That exhibition included among its 34 objects a filtered drinking straw that prevents the spread of typhoid and cholera; a bamboo treadle pump that helps poor farmers in Cambodia and India extract groundwater during the dry seasons; and the Q Drum, a doughnut-shaped plastic container, easily rolled, even long distances by children, which is used to transport up to 13 gallons of water.

The 2007 exhibition set the stage for this larger undertaking about whole cities, which couldn’t be timelier. We live in an era of unprecedented urban migration. Ms. Smith mentioned the billion people living in informal settlements, or slums. That number is projected to double by 2030, triple by 2050, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Program. By then one of three people on the planet will supposedly be living in favelas in Brazil, barrios in Ecuador, shack settlements in South Africa, bidonvilles in Tunisia or chapros in Nepal — the names are nearly as endless as the number of these sprawling, unplanned, impoverished places.

Ms. Smith spent a couple of years seeing what designers have been doing to improve living conditions in them. As at Bang Bua, one lesson seems strikingly obvious: the need to solicit the people living in poverty to come up with their own solutions. In so many slums — Dharavi in Mumbai, India; Corail in Bangladesh; Cape Town, South Africa; and in American cities too — the poor are left out of the process. But urban-renewal projects always work best when they’re ground up, not top down.

“The poor,” Somsook Boonyabancha, founding director of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, puts it in the show’s catalog, “are the creators and implementers of the most comprehensive and far-reaching systems for solving problems of poverty, housing and basic services.”

So in Diadema, a huge industrial city outside São Paulo, Brazil, 30 percent of the population used to live in favelas during the 1980s, when the homicide rate was shooting into the stratosphere. The government turned to residents for advice, asking them to help set priorities for the city budget, suggest upgrades for neighborhoods and approve construction projects, which employed workers who lived in the communities.

A land-tenure program awarded residents the right to stay on their property for 90 years, encouraging them to maintain their homes and invest in the neighborhoods. Residents helped to widen and pave streets, install clean-water and sanitation systems. Today, according to Ms. Smith, three percent of Diadema’s residents live in favelas, and the annual homicide rate, a standard measure of civic order and public health, has dropped to 14.3 per 100,000 from its high of 140 during the 1990s.

Ms. Smith also includes in the exhibition the by-now textbook case of Medellín, Colombia, once the world capital of drug cartels, murder and despair. Progressive political leaders there, starting roughly a decade ago, decided somewhat counterintuitively to invest most heavily in the worst slums, building a cable car system to link the city’s center with the isolated, crime-ridden areas that blanketed the surrounding hills. New libraries and parks, public schools and pedestrian walkways were built around the pylons of the transport system so that the most beautiful and ambitious public architecture in the city went into the poorest neighborhoods. Medellín became a changed place.

In Dakar, Senegal, designers working with community organizers developed an irrigation system to recycle wastewater in the crowded slum of Yoff. And in La Vega, one of the settlements lining the steep slopes around Caracas, Venezuela, a team of architects, engineers working with a geologist, again taking cues from residents, devised a series of new stairs and plazas, so impassable climbs became manageable, neighborhoods were linked and nobody was forced to move out of their homes.

I was struck by a map in the show that located 238 schools in Kibera, that dense settlement in Nairobi, which occupies a territory smaller than Central Park. I recall discovering a similarly astonishing number of schools and universities on trips to Gaza. Ms. Smith points out the case of Pune, one of India’s many booming cities, where laborers constantly move from one informal settlement to another, following construction projects and taking their families with them. As a consequence their children often aren’t enrolled in school.

In response a team of designers decided a decade ago to bring the schools to them, via buses equipped with classrooms for 25 that pick the students up where they live. Students receive old-fashioned handbooks that keep track of academic progress and list phone numbers for education centers around Pune (a second bus network is under way in Mumbai) so that when the children move, their parents can find schools in the new neighborhoods and teachers can pick up where the students left off.

Simplicity itself.

One last example, from Bangladesh: Mohammed Rezwan, a local architect, has designed “community lifeboats” that serve as floating schools, libraries and health clinics. With sea levels rising, nearly 20 percent of the land there is predicted to be under water by 2050. The low-lying Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, the most densely populated area in the world, will flood. Working with native boat builders Mr. Rezwan adapted the traditional flat-bottom bamboo riverboat to create his Noah’s Arks. He outfitted the boats with waterproof roofs and solar panels, installed computers, high-speed Internet and portable solar lamps made from recycled kerosene lanterns. Traditional materials, local building techniques and renewable energy sources produced a model of contextual design.

I’m hoping to check out this fleet and also a few of the cities the show celebrates, to see how they’re doing, firsthand. Meanwhile I gather there are now 54 of Mr. Rezwan’s boats in operation in Bangladesh, serving 90,000 families.

That’s design guru stuff too.

Southeast Asian Studies at Harvard University

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/sea/index.htm

Widener Library: East, South and Southeast Asian Section
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/#widener

Widener’s acquisitions from East, South, and Southeast Asia are primarily in English and other Western languages; however, this section also has responsibility for Sanskrit and Tibetan publications. Access to additional materials from those areas in Western and Asian languages is provided by Harvard’s membership in the South Asia Microforms Project, the Southeast Asia Microforms Project, and the Center for Research Libraries.

The central collection of publications in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Manchu, Mongolian) is in the Harvard-Yenching Library, supplemented by the collections in the Law School Library, the Rubel East Asian Collection (Fine Arts), and the Reischauer (Japan) and Fairbank (China) Centers libraries. South Asian languages in Arabic script are collected by the Middle Eastern Division in Widener. For more information contact Dr. Raymond Lum, Asian Bibliographer, at rlum@fas.harvard.edu .

Harvard-Yenching Library: The Vietnamese Collection
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/#hyl

The Vietnamese Collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library focuses on humanities and social sciences and is particularly strong in history and literature. Highlights of the collection include a complete set, on microfilm, of the Imperial Archives of the Nguyen Dynasty and rich holdings of the earliest Vietnamese-language newspapers and periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s. It also contains a number of 19th-century publications written in classical Chinese on Vietnamese history, law, political institutions, and Buddhism. In conjunction with the Vietnamese-language holdings of the Law School Library, the Fine Arts Library, and the Harvard Map Collection, the Vietnamese collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library plays an important role in supporting all Vietnam-related teaching and research activities at Harvard.

Questions and comments, including requests for materials and inquiries about how to use the collection, may be directed to Phan Thi Ngoc Chan, Librarian for the Vietnamese Collection, at phan@fas.harvard.edu or at (617) 495-6007.

Ernst Mayr Library
http://library.mcz.harvard.edu/

For more than 140 years the library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, now administered by the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, has served the museum and Harvard communities by providing a vast collection of natural history resources.

The library is located on the second floor of the museum, at 26 Oxford St., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. The phone number is (617) 495-2475. The library is open to the Harvard University community, students and faculty of other institutions, as well as to the general public.

The Rübel Asiatic Research Collection
http://hcl.harvard.edu/finearts/collections/rubel.html

The Rübel Asiatic Research Collection (RARC) is a department of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library. It ranks with the Library of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as one of the leading unified collections for the study of Asian art and archaeology in the nation.

The Rübel Asiatic Research Collection comprises approximately 17,000 volumes devoted to the history of Asian art. More specifically, the collection focuses on the art, architecture and archaeology of East Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and India. Its holdings include books, periodicals, offprints of rare and important articles, maps, rubbings of inscriptions from stone monuments, fine reproductions of Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings, auction and exhibition catalogs, and manuscripts, all brought together in a unique collection. The collection is especially strong in the history of Chinese ritual bronzes, Buddhist arts, Chinese and Japanese painting, Japanese woodblock prints and East Asian ceramics. About half of the holdings are in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. The rest are in English or Western European languages.

  The Houghton Library
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/#houghton

The Houghton Library is the principal rare book and manuscript library of Harvard College. Its mission is to support research and instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the University by acquiring, cataloging, securing, and preserving significant literary, historical, and visual materials, and by providing access to them through catalogs, finding aids, and an expert staff. The Library supports and supplements Faculty of Arts and Sciences academic programs through exhibitions, lectures, seminars, publications, and courses. Because of the richness of its holdings and the professional accomplishments of its staff, the Library serves as a resource for the entire Harvard community and for a national and international community of researchers and scholars.

Andover-Harvard Theological Library
Bibliography of Asian Studies
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:bibasian
The Bibliography of Asian Studies contains over 545,000 references to journal articles, chapters in multi-author volumes, conference proceedings, and anthologies from 1971 to the present, as well as individually authored monographs from 1971 to1991. It covers all subjects related to East, Southeast, and South Asia.

Asia Resources on the World Wide Web

http://www.aasianst.org/asiawww.htm
Raymond Lum’s extensive list of online resources, used for publication in the Asian Studies Newsletter.

Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia
http://www.cormosea.org/
The Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA) is a committee of the Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). It was established to enhance the collection of Southeast Asia research materials and to assist in making them available to Southeast Asia scholars, faculty, and students nationwide.

Harvard Asia Quarterly
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/haq/index.htm
Harvard Asia Quarterly, a journal of current affairs affiliated with the Harvard Asia Center, was established in 1997 by students at the Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as an interdisciplinary journal of Asian affairs.

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
http://lib.harvard.edu/e-resources/details/h/harvjast.html
Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Harvard University Press:
Bayly, C., Harper, T. (2005). Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945
Bayly, C., Harper, T. (2007). Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia
Brandon, J. (1967). Theatre in Southeast Asia
Cochran, S. (2006). Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China adn Southeast Asia
Woodside, A. (2006). Lost Modernities:China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History

Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology

http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/

Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest museums in the world devoted to anthropology and houses one of the most comprehensive records of human cultural history in the Western Hemisphere.

 Sackler Museum
http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/sackler/

The Arthur M. Sackler Museum houses superb collections of ancient, Islamic, Asian, and later Indian art. The museum includes one of the finest collections of Asian Art in the United States. The collection is particularly strong in the arts of East Asia, but also includes modest holdings of works from India, Central Asia and Tibet, and Southeast Asia; the greatest strengths lie in the fields of Chinese archaic jades and bronze ritual vessels, Buddhist art, and ceramics; Korean paintings and ceramics; and Japanese lacquer, calligraphy, printed books, and woodblock prints. The collection includes approximately 16,000 works, some 6,000 of which are woodblock prints.

 Southeast Asian Floras

http://www.huh.harvard.edu/research/projects/past

Center for Tropical Forest Science-Arnold Arboretum Asia Program
http://www.huh.harvard.edu/ctfs/ctfs/index.htm

The CTFS-AA Asia Program forms part of a global initiative in long-term tropical forest research, coordinated by the Center for Tropical Forest Science of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in conjunction with scientific collaborators around the world.

The broad objectives of the CTFS research program are: (1) to develop a general theory of tropical forest diversity and dynamics, providing explanations of the relative importance of biotic and abiotic factors in controlling species distributions and the regulation of population and community dynamics, and (2) to develop models incorporating ecological and economic analyses for predicting human impacts on and optimizing sustainable utilization of tropical forests. The program believes that these and many other fundamental ecological questions concerning tropical forests are best addressed by a comparative approach involving long-term, individual-based, mapped, permanent forest plots.

The consortium of researchers and institutions collaborating with CTFS has established a pantropical network of 17 large-scale permanent plots in 14 countries representing the diversity of tropical forests in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The information and research infrastructure available through the CTFS program provides a wealth of opportunities for local and international scientists to conduct research, and unparalleled opportunities for the education and training of students at all stages.

 

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