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The past three decades have witnessed great changes and developments in the publishing industry in China. One important change is that more and more new local gazetteers (or local histories) and yearbooks are compiled and published in book format. Local gazetteers and yearbooks are also increasingly available in electronic format through commercial databases or as is less known, in public domain. The purpose of this article is to address the following questions: What are new local gazetteers and yearbooks? Why so many titles are published now? Are there any free online full texts available? What are the free online full texts? In addition, I will briefly examine the institutionalization of compiling and publishing local gazetteers and yearbooks in China. Furthermore, I present the result of a survey on freely available online full texts of such materials that I conducted from 2007 through 2008. Given that commercial full-text databases of local gazetteers are unaffordable for most libraries in North America, it is hoped that students, researchers and librarians of Chinese studies shall find the free online full-text materials useful.

This study examines Western-language, particularly English-language, monographs on East Asian studies published in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and other countries from 2000 through 2005. The study provides a landscape view of the scope and trends of publications for both scholars and librarians in East Asian studies. The data for this study were collected from the YBP’s GOBI (Global Online Bibliographic Information) database, covering publications profiled by YBP from January 1, 2000, through December 31, 2005. The results of data analysis shed light on scholarly currents and publishing trends in East Asian studies over that six-year period.

The rich Chinese oral history collections at Columbia University mainly consist of the Chinese Oral History Project collection, the China Missionaries Project collection, the Academia Sinica Institute of Modern History Oral History collection, and the Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsuehliang, or Peter H. L. Chang) Oral History collection. This article intends to provide essential information on what is available, how to navigate through the multitudes of the collections, and how to communicate requests for access to Columbia libraries. It offers as an updated, comprehensive, consistent overview of Chinese oral history collections at Columbia for better access by users and librarians alike, particularly for Chinese-language users in Taiwan and China.

Source materials keep their scholarly value unabated with the passage of time. This is true of the Chinese Oral History collections at Columbia. Most of the collections were created, acquired in association with the Chinese Oral History Project undertaken about three decades ago, but they are still frequently inquired about and consulted by students and scholars researching modern China. All the original Chinese oral history collections are kept at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) at Columbia. Some difficulties in accessing the collections from afar and at Columbia have been reported by new users. Among other problems, new users assume that records for these Chinese-language oral histories have been completely entered into CLIO (Columbia Libraries Information Online), Columbia’s online catalog, and converted to LC pinyin system, and so are searchable in CLIO, but in fact this is not true. Many authors and titles of the oral histories, if known, are not directly searchable. Some general titles of oral history projects are searchable, and the search results offer substantial useful information in great detail. Yet, few users would search CLIO using the correct general titles, and some specific personal papers and archives cannot be located this way. Moreover, it seems the Journal of East Asian Libraries and other library professional periodicals have not carried any articles focusing on this important oral history collection. The Chinese Oral History project at Columbia officially started in 1958 and ended in 1980. Prof. C. Martin Wilbur, the project co-director, prepared an updated, but unfinished inventory for RBML in 1984. A number of other Chinese-related oral history projects of significant importance were conducted at or collected by Columbia. The available guides, printed in 1972, 1979, and 1984, were collected by some institutions, but they have been found not to be perfect in meeting the research needs of the new generation of users who are used to renewed, updated search tools. The general guide at RBML, which has been very useful, seems to be the aggregate of documents such as guides, inventories, and relevant journal articles from various sources at different time. Many of the documents in the guide are informal documents, with undated handwritten notes and corrections. It is necessary to offer an updated, comprehensive, consistent overview of Chinese oral history collections at Columbia for better access by users and librarians alike. Chinese oral history collections at Columbia mainly consist of the Chinese Oral History Project collection, the China Missionaries Project collection, the Academica Sinica Institute of Modern History oral history collection, and the Zhang Xueliang oral history collection. It is impossible for me to cover all the collections in detail in this article. This article intends to provide essential information on what is available, how to navigate through the multitudes of the collections, and how to communicate requests for access to RBML staff. In particular, it includes the lists of person names in LC pinyin, Chinese and original Romanization, and record titles of the transcribed memoirs, personal papers, and archives that users and librarians may find immediately useful.

The conventional criteria of website evaluation are widely applied in evaluating online information, which is an important component of information literacy instruction in academic institutions. However, mainly from the users' angle and inherently bibliographic, these criteria tend to be general in nature and fail to differentiate the qualities of websites at similar quality levels. Thus, evaluation criteria from webometric perspectives that utilize measurable data and tangible information are needed for more informed assessment. The purpose of this article is to introduce and apply essential webometric criteria to supplement the conventional criteria to improve information literacy instruction. The article first synthesizes the widely used conventional criteria into Six C's for the sake of simplicity and applicability. Then, important webometric criteria of popularity, profundity, luminosity, and error-checking are introduced. Next, the webometric data collected from leading demography research institutions' websites in the U. S. are analyzed. The article concludes that while conventional criteria continue to be convenient and useful, particularly for novel web users, a basic set of webometric criteria can serve as a supplementary tool to provide additional insights into evaluating online resources.

China's recent basic education reform followed and, in a certain way, imitated its economic reform. The economic reform merged the experimental dual (planned and market) price systems into a free market economy and yielded phenomenal success. Basic education reform, however, has not succeeded in transforming the introductory dual-track (key school and regular school) systems into a universal one. This article briefly examines the general process and outcomes of basic education reform. It discusses the following questions: Is basic education reform also a story of success? What significant lessons can the Chinese reform experience offer to other comparable developing countries?

With an introduction to the overall underdevelopment of higher education in China compared with the American counterpart, this article briefly examines the main trends of over two decades of development of the governance and financing systems of China's higher education sector. This article analyzes the resource allocation from governments and revenue generation in institutions under the reform policies of administrative decentralization and financing diversification. The new "Great Leap Forward" in higher education in 1999 and beyond, i.e., the radical and, to a certain extent, desperate mass higher education policy and practice of expanding enrollments in order to spur domestic consumption, is critically analyzed. By examining the ongoing institutional merging and "co-building" and the most recent enrollment expansion, the writer points out the economic significance for higher education of overcoming diseconomies of scale and inefficiencies. However, the long-range outcomes of the seemingly exciting investment in and consumption of mass higher education are difficult to predict.

I investigate the creation, development, contributions and limits of Project Hope, a huge government-endorsed education project seeking non-governmental contributions to overcome educational inadequacy in poverty-stricken rural communities in transitional China. By reexamining the composition of sponsored students, the locations of Hope Primary Schools and non-educational orientations for building and expanding schools, I argue that Project Hope and its Hope School system have not contributed to educational access, equality, equity, efficiency and quality as it should have. Poverty-reduction-oriented curriculum requirements in Hope Primary Schools are theoretically misleading and realistically problematic.