• 2017-12-01

On November13^th, 2017, NCL Director-General Tseng Shu-hsien and UCLA AssociateUniversity Librarian Dr. Sharon Farb attended a ceremony to mark the signing ofan agreement between the two libraries. In accordance with the spirit of the agreement,in future the two institutions will exchange staff, information, and materials.They will also co-host academic conferences in research fields in which theyshare a common interest. On the same day, a Taiwan Resource Center for ChineseStudies (TRCCS) was officially opened, the 25^th of its kind to beestablished worldwide, and the third to be established in the United States bythe NCL. The NCL have initially provided the UCLA TRCCS with a collection of1,151 both Taiwan and China studies related research titles spanning 1,188 volumes,which will be added to each year.

Established in 1919, the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles (UCLA) enjoys an excellent reputation as an instituteof higher learning, with a library listed as one of the most outstandingacademic libraries in the United States. Among the libraries in the UCLAlibrary system, the Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library was specificallyestablished to support East Asia-related teaching and research. It mainlycollects Chinese, Japanese, and Korean publications, the largest number ofwhich are written in Chinese. The books collected mainly relate to the fieldsof archeology, religion (particularly Buddhism), folklore, history, classicalliterature, and art. There is also a particular emphasis on collecting regionalhistorical documents and almanacs, of which there are a large number in thelibrary’s holdings. The NCL and UCLA have previously worked together: in 2012the two institutions jointly hosted a Taiwan Lecture on Chinese Studies, and in2016 they signed an MoU agreeing to work together on the database of Union Catalogueof Chinese Rare Books.