Library Area

New floor to ceiling shelving with glass doors accommodates a library collection of 2,000 (and growing) volumes. This is an outstanding resource for Friends World students, and is one of the few places in the province to find such a variety of current scholarship on China in English. The China Center also maintains a large collection of DVD and VHS movies, including numerous Chinese films with English subtitles and English language documentaries about China, many banned for Chinese audiences. All books and films are cataloged in a searchable database.

Our digital library provides access to hundreds of online indexes and databases, so students have direct access to many of the resources available at any major research library. For example, the Scholarly Journal Archive (JSTOR), just one of these indexes, provides access to the complete back issues of 241 academic journals covering 38 disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences, with a moving wall of typically three to five years from the current issue. These include fifteen academic journals in the discipline of Asian Studies, such as the standard Journal of Asian Studies, with back issues from 1941 to 2001, and the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, with back issues from 1936 to 1999, not to mention several academic journals in the field of Chinese studies, including the Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, China Journal, China Quarterly, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), and Modern China. Students will be able to search the full text of all the articles in each issue of every journal volume in this index, which can be downloaded or printed in PDF format.

In addition, the China Center also subscribes to Questia, reputed to be the world's largest online library of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences. It provides access to around half a million titles, including 56,000 complete books, 145,000 journal articles, 173,000 magazine articles, in addition to 668,000 newspaper articles and integrated online reference material. The interface also allows students to create online notes and underline text and has convenient tools for automatically generating footnotes and a bibliography of sources in a variety of styles. The China Center also maintains paper and online subscriptions to The Economist, and Time Asia, a monthly subscription to National Geographic, and to the English-language weekly, the Shanghai Star, and a daily subscription to the China Daily.

Students interested in researching Sino-U.S. policies are also encouraged to make use of the Information Resource Center in the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai, which provided up-to-date information on rule of law, economics and trade, regional security, the environment and U.S. society and values. IRC subscribes to several online databases, numerous print periodicals and several CD-ROM databases. For more information on specific periodicals and databses, please visit the IRC Website.

The IRC is located at 532 East Tower, Shanghai Centre, on 1376 Nanjing West Road and is open Monday-Friday from 8:30-11:30 and 1:30-4:30. (021) 6279-7662 X 4678.

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