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East Asian Library Korean Collection

The East Asian Library (EAL), the core of Berkeley's library holdings in East Asian studies, has been a branch of the University of California library system since 1947. With holdings of over 600,000 bound volumes in the languages of East Asia, including Korean, it ranks second among the nation's universities. It subscribes to 3,985 current periodicals in East Asian languages, more than any other university library.

The Library's Korean language holdings are equally extensive. The Ho-Chiang Collection of Buddhist Scriptures includes almost a hundred manuscripts and sutras from the eighth to eighteenth centuries, from China, Japan, and Korea. Probably the most valuable of collection of rare books is the Asami Library with 4,130 volumes of Korean woodblock-printed and movable-type imprints from the Joseon Dynasty (Yi Dynasty), by far the largest collection of such materials outside of East Asia.

The East Asian Library recently acquired 74 Korean movie titles, most produced in the 1990s or later. A listing is available online: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EAL/. The EAL will continue to add new titles.

In addition, the EAL has received a special fund of $39,000 from the UC Library Collection Council for five years, to purchase five Korean online databases. The databases include about 1,100 e-books andover 95% of the academic e-journals publishing in Korea as well. In addition, there are free trial versions of databases related to e-journal publishing in and about North Korea, as well as contemporary Korean history.

All of these databases can be accessed anywhere on campus and at home through the library proxy server (excluding the free trial version databases). For details on our Library's proxy server, please refer to the instructions online at:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Help/proxy.html. Information about these databases is also available on the EAL website: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EAL/

Korean Collection Librarian:
Chang, Jae-yong 장재용
jchang@library.berkeley.edu
510.643.0652