East Asian Specialist Literature

The East Department, one of the two regionally orientated departments of TIB, was established as a separate unit at the beginning of the 1980ies, in response to the increasing interest in the Far East of academia, research and industry. Hence, it is concerned with all kinds of literature and other forms of information sources originating in the Far East, as far as they fall within TIB’s range of subject areas, ie the basic, applied and engineering sciences. The department’s primary concern are publications and other media in the original languages, that is mainly Japanese, Chinese and Korean, but also those in Western languages.

The East Asia Collection is intended to make available such a range of material from the Far East as to provide a synopsis of the technological and scientific developments in that region, but also to allow more detailed, specialized information.

Therefore, the East Asia Department’s collections essentially consist of periodical publications, ie journals and serials of scientific and technical associations, reports of university and research institutes, conference proceedings, etc. Monographs, which to a lesser degree reflect the latest trends and developments, are restricted to selected scientific books series, specialist dictionaries, and other reference tools.
Presently, some 4000 Japanese, Chinese, Korean and South-East Asian periodicals/serials are currently held.

Catalogue:
The East Asia collections are integrated in the library’s general catalogue in romanized form. Items will be found by using the standard search methods, ie by full title, parts of the title, author or publisher, classification, keywords, or country code.

Transcriptions:
Transcriptions, or romanization, of the original East Asian scripts follow the modern international standards, ie for Japanese the Hepburn system is used, for Chinese the Hanyu-Pinyin system (references to the older Wade-Giles system are given where appropriate), and for Korean the McCune-Reischauer system. The original syllables are aggregated to form words connected by hyphens.