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Engaging East Asian Rare Materials

East Asian Resources at Brown University Library

East Asian materials are held in several of Brown University Library locations. The sections below detail the collections at each library location. You can search for East Asian material using keywords or subject headings using BruKnow, the Library catalog.

Rockefeller Library (“The Rock”)

panorama view of the inside of the Gardner Room in The Rockefeller Library
Panorama of the Gardner Room in the Rockefeller Library

Charles Sidney Gardner Collection and Gardner Room 

Named after Charles Sidney Gardner, who donated his collection of approximately 30,000 Chinese volumes to Brown in 1961, the Gardner Room predominantly features rare books, maps, and scrolls from China. Located on the third floor of the Rockefeller Library, the Gardner Room, along with an adjacent storage area informally referred to as “the cage,” and the surrounding stacks contain the majority of the Library’s East Asian materials. To view these materials, please make an appointment with Dr. Li Wang, Curator of the East Asian collections, whose office is inside the Gardner Room. Visit the websites Charles Sidney Gardner Collection and Profile of the East Asian Collection for more information about the Gardner Collection. See the list of the Library’s guides on East Asian Studies for more information about the different materials available to you.

The John Hay Library (“The Hay”)

Customarily called “The Hay”, this is home to Brown University’s special collections and archives. To help navigate its vast collections and find East Asian materials, please read this guide, East Asian Materials in Special Collections, before searching in this list of collections: Collections A-Z

Virginia Baldwin Orwig Music Library (“Orwig”)

Orwig Music Library houses the majority of Brown’s extensive music collections, with an extraordinary array of music and theater-related items. Its East Asian items include musical scores, compositions, records, and more, spanning various periods and regions over the past century. 

John Carter Brown Library (“The JCB”)

Located on the Brown University main green, the John Carter Brown Library is an independently administered and funded center for advanced research in history and the humanities. It is home to one of the world’s outstanding collections of printed books and other materials related to the early Americas. The JCB’s extensive collections include materials that chronicle the Americas’ early interactions with East Asia, highlighting a rich history of cross-cultural engagement. The JCB is committed to digitizing its entire collection, which can be accessed online. 

Brown Digital Repository (“The BDR”)

The Brown Digital Repository is the Library’s institutional repository, containing digitized items from the Library's collections, along with other scholarly digital objects submitted by members of the Brown community. The following collections of significant East Asian materials can be viewed in the BDR:

The BDR also contains the Brown Olio collection of miscellaneous content related to Brown University. 

Open Access Academic Resources on Chinese Studies

The following Open Access resources are available to the public and provide access to a wealth of sources of use to Chinese Studies scholars.

This list was originally assembled by Wang Guoqiang of the Luoyang Normal University. A revised version of this article has been published in the second issue of International Sinology. Click here to access the revised version.

Comprehensive

Books