All posts by ShanYi

I am the East Asian Studies Librarian at the University of Texas Libraries. I manage and develop collections related to East Asia, broadly defined. I am also trained as a historian of early modern China, specializing in book history, intellectual history, and history of religion.

Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized

Read, Hot and Digitized: Forms & Function – The Splendors of Global Book Making

October 13, 2025 ShanYi Leave a comment

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

On September 10, Princeton University Library unveiled a new digital and physical exhibition, titled “Forms and Function: The Splendors of Global Book Making.” The exhibition is a feast to anyone interested in book history, and especially those who want to learn about how the formats of a “book” varied through time and space. It is also a rare opportunity for the public to view some of the least known hidden gems in Princeton’s collections.

The exhibition includes manuscripts and printed books from Western, Islamic, East, South and Southeast Asian, and Mesoamerican cultures. There are seventy-four items on digital display, and they represent many materials for book making that may not be familiar to a contemporary and Western audience, including bark, textiles, shell, lacquer, and copper. The earliest produced book on display is an Egyptian clay cylinder from the 6th century BCE, while the latest is an Indian artistic book made with copper plates from 2020.

Three “traditions” of book formats are featured in the exhibition: the codex tradition, the East Asian tradition, and the pothī tradition.

The codices, defined in the exhibition as “single- or multi-gatherings of sheets folded inside each other, with texts on both sides, sewn together, and usually attached onto covers,” gradually replaced scrolls, and became the preferred format for early Christianity but later spread to Central and South Asia and was also adopted by Islamic and Hindu traditions. The exhibit includes an extremely rare early Coptic manuscript of Gospel of St. Matthew, and a palimpsest parchment on which the text was once erased to allow reuse.

Also included is a Chinese edition of Missale Romanvm produced by the Jesuits in 1670 which was printed with woodblock but bound in a European codex format.

The East Asian tradition, which included the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures, demonstrates a wide range of mediums and materials to produce reading materials and extensive influence into other Eurasia regions. Among the bamboo slips and Dunhuang scrolls is an inner garment with over 700 “eight-legged” exemplary exam essays written on it, totaling more than half a million miniature characters.

Figure 2. Pulinsidun daxue baguwen sichou chenyi

Another rare item on display is a reproduction of ink rubbings that the late-Qing statesman, Duanfang (端方, 1861–1911), made from Egyptian and Greek objects during his diplomatic missions in the early 1900s.

The pothī tradition, heavily influenced by the palm leaf, one of the earliest materials in the region used for writing texts, is no less diverse in terms of materials and formats that supported the texts. The exhibition features an earliest example of paper making from Nepal (1140), on which the popular Pañcarakṣā sūtra (Sūtra of the five protectresses) is written.

Figure 4. Pañcarakșā sutra (Sutra of the five protectresses)

Coming after the palm leaves, later materials, such as birch bark, gold, and paper, mimicked its progenitor’s shape. The loose pages were usually stacked to make a bundle. With Brahmanism and Buddhism, the format spread across South and Southeast Asia and reached the Mongols and Manchus through Tibet.

Figure 5. Coqbbertv (The emergence and migration of humankind)

Here is an example of a relatively understudied Dongba manuscript from the Naxi people, an ethnic minority living in China’s Yunnan province.

Beyond the main three themes, the exhibition also showcases some formats that different traditions share: single-sheet, scrolls, and accordion style. One of the highlights from this section is one of the earliest printed texts in the world, the Hyakumantō darani from Nara-era Japan.

Figure 6. Hyakumantō darani (A dhāraņī from inside a one-million-pagoda)

The work was commissioned by the court in 764. Printed Buddhist spells were inserted into mini pagodas. These short texts, also known as “mantras,” are verbal formulas and chants for various spiritual purposes. Currently, “tens of thousands of the pagodas and several thousand printed spells still exist.”

Last but not least, the exhibit shines light on even more materials that were used to serve as the media for texts. The hard surfaces of stone, metal, and bones were widely used across the globe. For example, a conch shell with Maya glyphs is on display in this section.

Figure 7. 1 Ajaw 3 Chakat (17 March, 761 CE)

The exhibition was curated by Dr. Martin Heijidra, Director of the East Asian Library at Princeton. The online version includes an interactive timeline and map, where viewers can click on the numbered titles of the items to go to their catalogue records, which has a brief but detailed description of the item and additional readings about the research on each of the items

Figure 8. A section of the interactive map

Online viewers can also download the PDF files of the accompanied catalogue and exhibition brochure. The digital exhibition not only provides an alternative for those who cannot see it in person, but it also gives it another form of life that will extend after the exhibition hall welcomes another array of objects.

Reference:

Martin Heijidra, curator (2025), Forms & Function: The Splendors of Global Book Making https://dpul.princeton.edu/global-book-forms

Tian, Tian. “Duanfang’s Egyptian Rubbings: The First Egyptian Collection in Late Imperial China.” Antiquity 99, no. 406 (2025): 1129–42. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10098.

Galambos, Imre. “The Chinese Pothi: A Missing Link in the History of the Chinese Book.” The Medieval History Journal 27, no. 1 (2024): 152–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/09719458241231669.

McDermott, Joseph Peter. A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China. Hong Kong University Press, 2006.

Kornicki, Peter F. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Brill, 1998.

Roper, Geoffrey. The History of the Book in the Middle East. Ashgate, 2013.

Global Studies, Humanities & Liberal Arts, Illuminating Explorations

Highlights from the William R. Braisted Collection

May 16, 2025 ShanYi Leave a comment

Everyday Knowledge in Early Meiji Japan from UT Libraries’ Collections

“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.

The Braisted Collection

This exhibit highlights a selection of items from the Braisted Collection on Meiji Japan. The Braisted Collection was gifted to the UT Libraries by the late Professor Emeritus of History, Dr. William R. Braisted (1918–2017) in 2000. A Maryland native, Braisted was the son of an American naval officer and spent many of his early years in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and mainland China. He attended the Shanghai American School for part of his high school. Later, he received a BA from Stanford University and eventually an MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1950. Braisted started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 1942 and retired in 1988,[1] and he was the founder of the East Asian Collections at UT Austin. Impressed by what he saw at the coastal elite institutions, especially the Harvard-Yenching Library, Braisted started advocating for and later became involved in building a working collection for Asian histories at the UT campus. In the 1950s, Braisted persuaded the History Department to provide funds to build the collection, when the University Libraries did not have an independent acquisition budget and relied on departmental funds to purchase materials. The first purchase order for Japanese materials was placed in 1953.[2] Before the first Asian Librarian, Dr. Tamie Tsuchiyama (1914–1984), arrived at UT in 1967, Braisted was instrumental in selecting and building UT’s East Asian collections.

The donation included many pre-20^th-century materials, which were likely acquired by Braisted during his Fulbright trip to Japan from 1955 to 1956. At that time, Braisted was interested in researching the intellectual and political histories around the “Japanese Enlightenment” during the Meiji Restoration, and his attention specifically dwelt on a group of intellectual elites known as the “Meiroku club.” In popular historiography, the Meiji Restoration in 1868 marks the beginning of Japan’s “modern” era, when a group of rebellious and reformist Samurai overthrew the Edo Bakufu and “restored” the country to the rule under the Meiji Tennō. However, in their political outlooks, the Meiji political elite championed political, social, and military reforms modelled after the post-Enlightenment West. The Meiroku club, around whom Braisted built this collection, was a leading group of educators, politicians, and scholars who contributed to the reformist discourses during the early Meiji years.

Braisted’s research into the club ultimately culminated in his translation of the entire run of the Meiroku Zasshi 明六雑誌, the magazine edited and published by the group. For this project, he collected works written by the major figures in this intellectual circle, including Katō Hiroyuki 加藤弘之 (1836–1916), Nishimura Shigeki 西村茂樹 (1828–1902), Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 (1835–1901), Nishi Amane 西周 (1829–1897), and Mitsukuri Rinshō 箕作麟祥 (1846–1897).

Beyond works by these luminary figures, the Braisted Collection also included many books that were popular during the era, including textbooks, handbooks, news magazines, compilations of laws, parliamentary papers, etc. Last but not least, Braisted also meticulously collected Japanese scholarly monographs on the history, culture, diplomacy, and politics of the Meiji era.

This Exhibit

The Meiji era was a period of confusing and competing ideologies and thoughts, and many intellectuals shared an urgency and impulse to influence and educate the “masses” while a nationwide school system was being designed and built. This exhibit showcases some of the products of this dynamic moment in Japanese intellectual and cultural history. Many of the books were either produced to educate the general literate populace or to provide practical knowledge for everyday use. Also, books produced in this era appeared in different physical formats and had different appearances, as machine-powered printing technologies were making their way into Japan, while centuries-old woodblock printing still persisted.

Let’s start with the material hybridity of the books in this exhibit. Although post-Enlightenment wisdom from Europe flooded into Japan in the 1860s, industrialized book production did not move that quickly. Most of the books published in this era, as we see in this collection, were continuously made and bound in the traditional wasō 和裝 format and printed by woodblocks. Many continued to receive the iconic yellow cover from the Edo era, though some of those that were rushed to the market, for example, the news magazines, did not. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, industrialized printing became more widely available to Japanese publishers. Moveable type letterpress hence replaced the woodblocks to become the most prevalent way to print. However, many of the books still preserve the physical appearances one would expect to see in a woodblock, such as the frames that surround the texts and the vertical, right-to-left textual arrangement.

Before metal types became widely available in the late nineteenth century, woodblocks remained the primary way that Japanese books were made. As a versatile and flexible medium, woodblock can reproduce many different types of texts and images. An interesting example in this exhibit is the woodblock reprinted Dutch physics textbook, titled in Japanese Kakuchi mondō 格致問答 (Questions and answers in studies of the physical world). The book was published in the Netherlands by letterpress in 1814. Its Japanese publisher, Mitsukuri Rinshō, however, reproduced it by woodblock using his own handwriting.

FIGURE 1 First page in the main body of *Kakuchi mondō*

During the majority portion of the Edō era, the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to maintain trade relations with Japan. Although they were physically confined on a small island called Dejima outside of Nagasaki, European knowledge, mediated by the Dutch merchants, penetrated into the Edō intellectual scene. A field called rangaku 蘭学 (Dutch Learning) emerged, but such studies were largely confined to medicine and natural studies. Mitsukuri was appointed by the last Shogun to lead the short-lived Bakufu office/school, Bansho shirabejo 蕃書調所, to study and collect Dutch books. The other Dutch book on the language’s syntax and grammar was also published by Mitsukuri in a similar manner.

Last but not least, this exhibit also includes a field manual for farmers from the Edō period, Seiu benran 晴雨便覧 (A convenient companion of sun and rain), dated to 1767. It includes sophisticated illustrations and diagrams informing farmers how to make decisions on agricultural activities. It was a ground-breaking work not only as a primer for understanding weather conditions but also to teach readers how to predict weather, considering both local geography and meteorological phenomena.^[3]

FIGURE 2 Page 5a, vol. 1 in *Seiu benran*

The Meiji intellectuals’ push to educate the Japanese mass was also reflected in their efforts to establish schools across the country. The literacy/vocabulary primer, Tangō zue 単語図会 (Illustrated vocabulary) was published by one of the earliest normal schools established by the reformist Meiji elite. Its compilers were concerned that the Japanese children lacked an authoritative and systematic source of vocabulary of the new era. The vocabulary introduced in it range from everyday items from clothes to books, natural phenomena to new scientific notions. The book was produced using woodblocks and printed in color.

The anthology Meiji bunhan 明治文範 (Model essays of the Meiji era) was compiled for students in Japan’s emerging normal schools in the early twentieth century. Normal schools themselves were complicated institutions. The student body of a normal school was often made up of teenagers and those in their twenties, and they would be assigned to schools at different levels after graduation. The anthology included in this exhibit was aimed at cultivating a baseline literary capability for the country’s new teachers. The essays included traditional literary poetry, an excerpt of the Meiji constitution, and newspaper articles.

Read, Hot and Digitized: Following the Archives to Know Shanghai (Gen zhe dang an guan Shanghai 跟著檔案觀上海)”

August 13, 2024 ShanYi Leave a comment

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Among the candidates for the Best Data Visualization category in the 2023 Digital Humanities Award, I found this recent project from the Shanghai Archives (Shanghai dang an guan 上海檔案館, Following the Archives to Know Shanghai). The project beautifully takes viewers on a tour through Shanghai’s most significant historical sites. It is built on archival materials about over 100 city landmarks in Shanghai. All the sites are plotted onto georeferenced historical maps. Viewers can choose from 13 base historical maps ranging from 1855 to 2024 (The following screenshot features a base map from 1923). Currently, the site only supports Chinese as the interface language, but Google Translate does a sufficient job of making it navigable in English.

Figure 1. Screenshot of all landmarks referenced on a 1923 map.

Shanghai, one of the first treaty ports that China opened to the West in the 1840s, grew into one of Asia’s biggest international metropolises and financial centers by the late nineteenth century. The city was home to many of modern China’s political, economic, and cultural elites, and its foreign concessions hosted thousands of foreign merchants, colonial officials, missionaries, and adventurers. Since the nineteenth century, the city also saw many major historical events that shaped modern China. For example, as the hub of China’s emerging modern/Westernized educational institutions, Shanghai was one of the centers of the May Fourth movement in 1919 that popularized Western political and scientific values to new generations of Chinese youth. Soon after, the Chinese Communist Party convened its national congress in the city in 1921. The city was also home to many international banks and manufacturing enterprises, which incubated the labor movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Beyond all these, the battles between the Chinese soldiers and invading Japanese forces in 1931 and 1937 were fought on the city’s streets while spies serving various regimes hustled throughout the city ruled by both Chinese and foreign authorities.

This project by the Shanghai Archives aims to present this complex and exciting history to the users. Sites are categorized into five categories: famous people’s residences (mingren guju 名人故居), revolutionary landmarks (hongse dibiao 红色地标), youth movements sites (qingnian yundong 青年运动), transportation infrastructures (jiaotong 交通), and ships and shipyards (lun chuan 轮船).

To explore a location, you click on it on the map, and a new window opens up on the right side, showing a timeline with documents related to the landmark. The following example shows eleven items related to the HSBC Bank building on the bund (waitan 外灘). Most items are historical photographs of the building, but the collection also contains a digitized copy of the bank’s stock certificate from 1894. The site also provides 3D models of the buildings for users to explore.

Figure 2. A Stock Certificate of the HSBC Bank from 1894.

Figure 3. 3D model of the HSBC Bank Building.

The project also provides audiovisual materials for some storied sites. For example, among the items related to the racecourse (Pao Ma Chang 跑馬場), there is a short documentary showing historical clips of events held there.

Figure 4. A documentary clip featuring the Shanghai horse racecourse.

The project is commendable in making archival materials available to the public in an interactive and engaging way, although it does have a pronounced emphasis on the communists’ activities in presenting the story map. As metadata is the foundation of all digital humanities projects, I am compelled to comment that the metadata of presented archival items leaves much to be desired. In the map view, items are only provided with title, source, and year, without any identifying numbers linking back to the Archives or its partner institutions. The browse view features a waterfall layout like Pinterest, which may be compelling to some but unfortunately does not provide more metadata than the story map view.

Figure 5. A waterfall view of archival materials available through the project.

Overall, the site offers an engaging journey through Shanghai’s recent past. It is exciting to see more locations and archival materials being added. I hope the quality of metadata can be enhanced one day. It would also be great if the textual documents could be OCRed and searched in full text.

Learn more about Shanghai and its history:

Dian Shi Zhai hua bao: A Major Shanghai-based pictorial magazine (1884–1898).

Liang You: Shanghai-based popular magazine published from 1926 to 1945.

Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: the Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999).

Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009)

Frederick Wakeman, Policing Shanghai 1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Global Studies

Back in China, after five years

August 13, 2024 ShanYi Leave a comment

After almost five years, I was able to travel back to China in May and June. This time, my first in the country in my current role as East Asian Studies Librarian, I was eager to bring back more unique library materials, meet and connect with library colleagues and vendors in China, and get up to date with the Chinese book scene after so long.

I started my trip in Beijing, the country’s capital city and cultural center. There, I visited a popular weekend book market at Baoguo si 報國寺, an old temple complex first built in the Ming dynasty. In the 1940s, the complex was occupied by both local and central authorities in charge of granary administration. In the late 1990s, the temple complex became a famous antiquarian market. Not until this spring did it welcome second-hand book vendors and rebrand itself into a used book bazaar.

Second-hand and antiquarian book market in Baoguo si.

From the Baoguo si market, I selected several sets of xiao ren shu 小人书, a palm-sized comic book that took shape in post-1949 China. The sets I bought are primarily adaptations of popular foreign films and fiction from the 1980s, an era when Western culture was (re)introduced into China. Through this inexpensive and readily available format, Xiao ren shu became a genre through which Chinese readers gained a peep into popular foreign literature and film.

*Xiao ren shu* comic books on sale at Baoguo si

Similar collectibles can also be found in Beijing’s Panjiayuan second-hand market (Panjiayuan jiuhuo shichang 潘家園舊貨市場). Having taken shape in the early 1990s, the giant market has gradually replaced the centuries-old Liulichang 琉璃廠 to become the biggest antiquarian market in Beijing. Panjiayuan has both “permanent” shops and make-shift booths that have vendors selling jewelry, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy, religious and ritual supplies, furniture, and, of course, books, and occasionally archival and manuscript materials.

Flipping through an old archive folder at Panjiayuan.

Beijing is also home to many of the vendors we work with here at UT Libraries. CIBTC (China International Book Trading Company) and Zhenben are the two book trading companies that UTL has partnered with for decades. In my discussions with representatives from both, I learned so much about the current state of the Chinese publishing market as these vendors are a critical part of the ecosystem of East Asian collections in North America. They help us to work around language barriers and complex legal requirements for exporting and importing library materials and they also help us hunt down rare and unique items our patrons need. I also was able to visit our electronic resource vendors. For example, I met with representatives from CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure), a crucial vendor through which we can get access to the vast amount of academic information from China. There, I toured their automated data processing unit and met with the head of the overseas department. I learned about the company’s recent advances in AI, their large language model (LLM) and new products in both the development and deployment pipelines.

Last but not least in Beijing, I was able to visit the First Historical Archives (Di yi lishi dang’an guan 第一歷史檔案館) which moved to a new location in 2021. In my life as a Qing historian, the “Yi shi guan” (as people in the field like to call it) has been a treasure trove. In its new location, they have also established new visitation and usage procedures. For example, foreign and domestic researchers are now treated similarly. Likewise, scheduling is now simplified and online. Under these revised access procedures, I was able to spend some very happy hours reading and transcribing some 18th- and 19th century documents in the brand new building.

The entrance hall of the First Historical Archives.

After Beijing, I traveled to Nanjing and Shanghai. In Nanjing, I revisited the bookshops near Nanjing University that I frequented as a college student over a decade ago–I was glad to see that all the establishments are still in business. Nestled in the narrow streets behind the university, these bookshops continue to be highly aligned with their main clientele’s (professors and students) intellectual interests– one may very well be able to find very rare out-of-print editions that freshly came out from a scholar’s private library. Indeed, I was able to bring several of those back to UTL.

Last but not least, serendipitously, I met with public engagement colleagues at the Shanghai Library, the largest library system in China and according to its claims, the third largest in the world by collection volume. While there, I was intrigued by the innovative strides the library is making to attract the public. One such example is their gamification of the famous Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone. The masterpiece of Chinese literature is transformed into a role-playing game with well-designed props and plots through which participants gain an immersive experience in the intriguing and poetic world of the fiction and as well as compete with each other in a monopoly-like game.

Part of the *Dream of Red Chamber* game developed by the Shanghai Library.

I have gained so much knowledge of the current state of China’s scholarly publishing landscape and strengthened our collaborations with vendors to get critical research resources available to researchers and students at UT. Trips like this are crucial for us at UT Libraries to keep up with the new developments in the fields and meet the ever-evolving needs of our users. We deeply appreciate the generosity of donors to our Hornraiser fundraising, which has made overseas trips possible and allows the global collections at UTL to grow and evolve. I also thank the Center for East Asian Studies’ generous support to the trip and their continuous support to the UT Libraries.

Digital Scholarship, Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized

READ HOT AND DIGITIZED: I Know We Will Meet Again, Japanese Canadians’ Letters, 1942–1948

July 6, 2023 ShanYi Leave a comment

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.

One day when I was familiarizing myself with the history of Japanese Canadians, I encountered this lovely, small online exhibition. It is built on 36 PDF files of digitized letters selected from the Joan Gillis fonds, housed at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. The exhibition, beautifully titled “I know we will meet again,” tells a dark and brutal episode in Japanese Canadian history from 1942 to 1948.

The letters were written by young Japanese Canadians to Joan Gillis (1928–2019, more info on Gillis), a white teenage girl they shared elementary and middle school years with before being forcefully removed from their homes in British Columbia to various locations in interior Canada during WWII. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government seized fishing boats and confiscated cameras and shortwave radios owned by Japanese Canadians. In January 1942, the Canadian federal government passed an order to remove Japanese Canadians from coastal British Columbia. By March 1942, about 22,000 Japanese Canadians were dispersed to areas east of the Rocky Mountains and were not granted freedom until 1949. During their forced removal, the Canadian government also seized, confiscated, and sold Japanese Canadian properties left in BC, including lands, houses, farms, etc.

The letters detail the harsh childhood and teenage years that Gillis’ Japanese Canadian friends had to endure. All the letters in this exhibition have been scanned, transcribed, annotated, and geo-coded, thereby making it easy to explore the letters’ content by author, theme, location, and time.

For example, when we choose to browse by subject, we are directed to a beautiful and effective visualization of the subjects discussed.

Figure 1. Color-coded subject visualization

As a person with mild color vision deficiency, I have to commend the curators’ apparent thoughtfulness in making the spectrum easier to see. Click on the little colored circles, then the associated subject will be highlighted in each letter.

Likewise, one can open up a transcript and see every sentence’s annotated subject on the right.

Maps help users grasp the extent of the dispersal of the letter writers as each letter is encoded with coordinates. One can zoom in and out to see the physical distance between the letter writers. One suggestion I would have is to mark Gillis’ location as well, just to give viewers a sharper sense of how far they have been dispersed.

Figure 3. An overview of the letters’ locations.

Figure 4. A zoomed-in and city-level view of the letters’ original locations.

The curators have enhanced the exhibition through suggested themes which include essays that reference snippets from the letters. These essays give historical contexts in which the letters were produced. For example, in the essay on “Communications,” the curators discuss how the correspondence between Gillis and her friends was censored by the Canadian authorities. Under “Labour,” one will find more information about sugar beets farming that many letter writers’ families “volunteered” to engage in, although the letters make clear this “volunteering” was the only option other than labor camps and the splitting up of families.

Last but not least, I love the notes under “About the Collection.” The Land Acknowledgement is specific and lists all Indigenous lands that are mentioned in the collection. There is also a deep reflection of publicizing materials that were meant to be private and intimate. In particular, how the wartime censorship adds another layer of complexity to the nature of this correspondence. The curators’ own personal reflections communicated their own positionality towards the project and personal growth in a profound and touching way.

The project is built with open-source tools. The content management tool, CollectionBuilder is a set of static web templates for online collections created and maintained by librarians at the University of Idaho. The transcriptions are prepared with Oral History as Data, also a static web tool based on Github Pages and Jekyll to analyze and visualize transcripts, also by the same group at the University of Idaho.

I love the collection not only in the sense it teaches me about a dark episode in history effectively but also demonstrates how such a project can help each of us grow by reflecting on our own positions in relation to the history documented in the project.

Yi Shan is East Asian Studies Librarian at the University of Texas Libraries.

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