HKU Bulletin November 2009 (Vol. 11 No .1)

24 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin 25 November 2009 THE INTELLECTUAL coffee house What Hong Kong needs, says the new Head of the School of Humanities, is greater cultural capital. The day of the printed journal, he says, is already over. But quenching this ever- increasing thirst for knowledge is a costly business. Lack of funding, and lack of space, are the twin evils that constrain a library’s growth and relevance. “We tend to buy journals in packages and we spend more than $12.9 million annually, on Elsevier alone for just 3,000 scientific journals.” And access to this vast repository of knowledge is all very well, but locating the book, journal or DVD has become an art in itself. “So we’ve changed the way we help people,” says Dr Ferguson. Reference can now be done by telephone, text, e-mail, chat, Twitter, or in person. “We have tried to become more specialized and upgrade skills amongst our staff. At the heart of every university is its library, but 21st century libraries are not simply repositories for printed materials and other media, they have evolved beyond their physical boundaries to provide access to tremendous stores of knowledge 24 hours a day. At HKU our Libraries have changed dramatically under the leadership of Dr Tony Ferguson. Libraries, he says, do three things – acquire content, help people find that content, and provide a place for study. “In the eight years that I’ve been here our library has changed radically in all three of those areas.” When he arrived from Columbia University, in 2001, the University Libraries were spending around 12% of their materials budget on electronic information. “This year we surpassed 70%,” he says. “Increasingly e-books are becoming more important, but even if that weren’t the case why should we buy them? Well, space is a huge problem, we have a half million volumes in Hing Wai storage and it’s full. Now we are leading a campaign to build a shared storage facility in Kowloon (with Hong Kong’s sister institutions). Another reason is that electronic information is available 24/7. When I first came we had about 17,000 journal subscriptions (2002). We now have more than 55,000 and they’re all electronic.” “We require that our professionals all have a bachelor degree and a master’s degree in library science and we are encouraging them to get masters, or doctorate, in other subjects – these are the people who select books, and some of them head up branch libraries like Medicine, or are in the collection development department.” The Libraries employs nine subject specialists and Dr Ferguson is keen to start a serious preservation programme for books, journals and electronic files. He wants to hire a preservation specialist who can teach bindery staff how to restore rare books. They are also trying to put many of their skills classes (like how to find information in biochemistry) onto the web so they can be accessed any time, relieving students of the need to sign up for a class. In visual terms too the library is quite a different place to what it was a decade ago, with regular exhibitions, book talks and, thanks to the demands of the new curriculum, freedom to socialize, eat, drink and even talk above the traditional library whisper, in selected areas. “With a problem-based curriculum students need to get together and work as a team, so the library has had to change. We have to recognize that kids are different today – if you’re going to protect the books from everybody and not allow food and drink, if people, aren’t allowed to talk you’re going to have a mausoleum. We’ve tried to make it much friendlier.” People He has also founded the Society of Scholars which brings together some of the best graduates in the Humanities from all parts of the world to live and interact in Hong Kong for two years. Launched in September with scholars in Fine Arts, English and History, the Society will expand next year with scholars in Linguistics, Philosophy, Music and Comparative Literature. “The idea is that they will all do a new research,” explains Professor Chua. “They don’t have to interact with each other, but because they form a group of very bright people in residence at Robert Black College, something creative will happen, I’m sure. “Over 400 people applied for these scholarships and the quality was so high it even surprised the staff in the School. The scholars will interact with the various departments so this should stimulate new ideas, new types of research, and will hopefully inspire our own students.” It is hoped that that these scholars will become long-term ambassadors for the University, helping to raise our research profile in the Humanities overseas. “Another thing I’ve done is set up a new Centre for the Humanities and Medicine – a joint venture between the Faculty of Arts and Medicine; this is genuine interdisciplinary research. Again it’s about creative clusters. A huge number of people in the Humanities and Medicine are interested in each other’s work, but you’ve got to create an environment in which the interest can blossom and bear fruit.” Professor Daniel Chua Kwan-liang is on a mission to raise the profile of the Humanities in Hong Kong, and to create a new sense of ‘identity, unity and purpose’ for the School. A musicologist and former professor at King’s College London, Professor Chua is only 18 months in the job and is well on the way to achieving his mission with a number of new projects. “I want to form a series of creative clusters,” he says. “If I provide a space where different people and different disciplines can interact, something new and exciting may happen; but it’s not the sort of thing that I can fully determine.” The first of those ‘creative clusters’ occurred in July and August this year when the Arts Faculty attracted scores of newcomers to campus with a series of musical and literary events organized under The Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities. Professor Chua describes it as “a huge messy celebration of the Arts and Humanities within HKU. We filled the campus with lots of activity for local and international students as well as the public. Many of these events were quite innovative, so we received a fair bit of media coverage. Hopefully such clusters of activity will spark off other ideas.” These projects reflect what he would like to see in the Humanities at HKU as a whole – a sense of collegiality, or what he terms “coffee houses, where we sit and talk to each other. Much of our research is done in isolation; we do not collaborate in the way that scientists do. So I’m trying to create a kind of intellectual coffee house for scholarly ideas to mingle. We facilitate rather than control or manipulate.” Professor Chua wants the intense aroma from such ‘coffee houses’ to waft beyond the wall of academia. “After all, the Humanities is about how we should live in the world,” he says. “It’s about thinking creatively and critically. It’s an outlook. We give students knowledge for life rather than training people for a fixed profession.” He hopes that the proposed West Kowloon Cultural District (which intends to bring together a vibrant mix of performing and visual arts) will allow the Humanities to contribute further within the community. “Hong Kong has a lot of hard currency. But what about the intellectual currency? Can we at HKU provide the intellectual currency for cultural growth? Because a mature society has both, and Hong Kong seems to be at the verge of a cultural awakening. Perhaps the School of Humanities can help shape something significant at this critical time.” NOT DOING IT BY THE book They may have been with us since antiquity but new technology has revolutionized the way libraries are accessed and utilized.