Collection Description

The East Asian collection has historically been strong in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, especially in pre-modern and modern history, literature, and Buddhism. Recent focus is the acquisition of economics, political science, public policy, sociology, business, women, government, ethnic and cultural studies, women studies, and film studies and other fields to study new issues related to the East Asia studies. We actively add to our growing electronic collection through full-text databases, electronic journals, online reference tools and increasingly e-books. We also focused on acquiring visual resources in order to serve the current academic trend of studying such materials. These include photographs, documentary and feature films, and reproductions of old periodicals. The collection includes both academic and popular materials in all formats. Among 425 languages currently collected by the UW Library System, the Chinese language collection ranks number six and the Japanese language ranked number ten.