Message from Eleanor Yuen
Head, Asian Library
University of British Columbia

This year, we are celebrating our 50^th birthday truly at another new era of knowledge creation and curation.

We know that it is imperative that we revisit our roles, re-configure our service model and repurpose our facilities. From the inception with the amassing of Chinese and Japanese classics in humanities to being the very place that users at UBC and beyond turn to for information on Asia, we have filled our shelves, physical and virtual with more than 580,000 items and delivered information on multiple platforms that is rich with databases, web sites, blogs, videos, images, audios and much more. We respond to users’ changing study habits and demands, face-to-face or online through social networks. Our commitments to the community run deep and we have been welcoming an exponential number of community members. We are privileged to call the beautiful Asian Centre home but we have yet to improve the functionalities of the space and the ambience of the library.

Our 2010 team of ten needs to champion the necessary transition from print to on-line collections and help patrons to adapt to the state-of-art information skills. Predictions about information trends and future technologies may always be fraught with uncertainty. While we are excited by the opportunities on the horizon, we also have to reposition ourselves for the burgeoning virtual world and the growing and diverse user communities that support and challenge us. It is no long satisfying to find strength in the supremacy of number. Rather, with the largest Asian collection in Canada in seven languages as the cornerstone of the library, we must stay forward-looking, courageous, agile and adaptable.

Together with our users, may we strive to bridge Asian culture with that of Canada and indeed North America and be a living library of Asian studies and research in the new era of information ecology.

Could we combine wisdom of the east
with the progress or “push” of the west in a Latin phase of 3 or 4 words
Sketch of UBC Crescent Frank Westbrook fonds, Box 1-17

Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
— All things are changing, and we are changing with them

Cheers to the three “r” s at the Asian Library!