LIBRARY
Joint East Asian Studies Center
Combined, UCLA and USC offer the 3rd largest university library in the North America. Our East Asian language collections, taken together, represent the continent's 6th largest holdings. The East Asian Library at UCLA was established in 1948 and is itself among the top 10 in the U.S. As of summer 2009, it held 546,175 volumes, 90,101 microform items, 8,416 CD-ROMs and other non-print materials, and receives 3,083 serial titles annually. Library strengths include Chinese archeology, Buddhism, folklore, history, and classical literature of China, Japan, and Korea. The Korean collection, developed since 1985, has additional strengths in the areas of North Korean scholarship and Korean Christianity. The collection on Chinese and Japanese fine arts is one of the preeminent ones in the West, and that on Japanese Buddhism is the best outside Japan.
The East Asian Library at USC was formally established in 1989, though the Library had been collecting Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials for many years prior. The most dynamic part of the library over the past two decades has been the growth of the Korean Heritage Library into one of the leading Korean collections in the country, with particular strengths in linguistics, cinema, journalism/ mass communication and local materials of the Cholla-do region. The library's Korean video/DVD holdings are the best in the nation. Other EAL collection strengths include early Japanese history and culture, modern Japanese military history, Chinese etymology, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Japanese Communism.