Meet Ya Min Wu, Chinese Rare Books Cataloguer at UBC Library

After a year term as a Chinese Rare Books Cataloguer, Ya Min Wu returned to his Chinese Collections Support Assistant role with Technical Services today.

Ya Min Wu has worked at UBC Library for the last five years. But his experience working with Chinese rare books goes back even earlier.

“Before I came to Canada [in 2001], I worked in a public library in China, Liaoning Provincial Library. I was there for about 15 years,” he says. “I primarily worked on the Chinese rare books, so I have lots of time spent on rare books authentication, cataloguing and some preservation.”

Moving from China to Canada with his family, he switched tracks to work in business and manufacturing in Vancouver for the next decade before returning to library work at a small company in Burnaby that provided library services to the Richmond, Burnaby and Vancouver Public Libraries. Later, when an opportunity came up to work at UBC Library, he joined the Technical Services team in 2014 to work with Chinese language materials.

“UBC has a great Chinese rare book collection. It’s a huge collection, outside China,” he says, noting that the entire collection includes about 4,000 titles in 60,000 volumes, making UBC a top-tier research library for Chinese Studies in North America.

One of his first major projects at the library was to work on Discovering Modern China, a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) project that involved close collaboration between UBC’s Asian Library and the University of Washington East Asia Library to catalogue large volumes of valuable but hidden scholarly material: “At Asian Library there are lots of uncatalogued materials that have not been touched before. We worked very hard, together with some student assistants and Asian Library’s Chinese Studies Librarian to originally catalogue more than 1,000 items in one year.”

In 2018, the library got funding support through donors to work on the Puban Collection, UBC’s largest Chinese rare books collection, consisting of 45,000 volumes spanning subject fields like history, literature, philology and philosophy. Ya Min’s work is now centered on the Puban Collection, both cataloguing the collection and planning for its future storage, preservation, conservation and digitization.

“The project is focused on how to organize and make the Puban Collection support teaching and research. For the past 60 years, the collection has helped to make UBC Asian Studies one of the best in the world,” he says. “So how can it benefit new students in the future? This is the project.”

In honour of the 60th anniversary of the Library’s acquisition of the Puban Collection in 1959, Ya Min Wu will be hosting bi-weekly tours highlighting items from the collection at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. Learn more about the tours.