National Libraries: Working to Preserve a Nation’s Cultural Heritage

Libraries are important cultural institutions that work to not only provide universal access to information and knowledge, but also preserve the cultural heritage and identity of the communities they serve. National libraries such as the United States’ Library of Congress or Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional de España work to achieve these objectives on a national scale. Read the rest.

The Japanese Rare Books Collection at Illinois

The Japanese rare books collection is an important part of the Asian rare books collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The great majority of Japanese rare books came from the library of Joseph K. Yamagiwa (1906-1968).  Professor Yamagiwa was a leading scholar and professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan. Read the rest.

Mo Yan — 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner

Literary history holds many examples of writers who were formerly soldiers — Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brian, Stephen Crane, and T. E. Lawrence to name a few, but few of them can ever hope to be called such things as “[…] famous, oft-banned and widely pirated […] (Feb 15, 2005. Read the rest.

Arabic Manuscripts There and Here

 

Released during the Algiers Book Fair on September 20th, the Association for the Protection of Heritage of the city of Bou-Saada has joined E-Corpus to disseminate their Arabic manuscripts digitally. By the time that the book fair had started, the stand for the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region (which co-financed the operation with the European Union) were already offering 4,600 pages from across 50 manuscripts. Read the rest.

Mid-Autumn Moon Festival

Friday September 30th was the 2012 Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, also known as the Mooncake Festival, which is a holiday celebrated in Chinese and Vietnamese culture. The IAS had our own Mooncake festival celebration on Monday Oct 1st.

The tradition of eating mooncakes during this festival allegedly began with a “14th-century uprising against the Mongols, when word of the revolt was spread by concealing the message in cakes that were then smuggled out to compatriots.” Read the rest.