taiwan: not germany

Yesterday I spent all day at Academia Sinica which, aside from the aforementioned life-saving gym, is also home to Taiwan’s best-ish library system. This weekend is probably the last chance I will have to even think about written materials for the next two increasingly crazy-looking months or so, so it was particularly enjoyable to spend an entire day by myself rifling through stacks and making copies of things. Half the things I see cited in various places are completely un-track-downable, either because they were published in 1994, went out of print in 1996, and were never heard from again, or because they are cited in some clever way that makes them impossible to ever actually find. Which is a good thing, actually, because it means less reading in Chinese. (Horrid, horrid, Chinese!, an updated, globalized Cecily might say.)

Academia Sinica has about twenty different Institutes, and each one has its own library, and every library has its own rules – in the Ethnology Institute you can't take your backpack in; in the Modern History Institute you have to leave an i.d. at the front desk. This seems extremely efficient all around, both in terms of giving you the chance to get the book even if everyone else wants to get it too (as the same book often ends up being bought by three or four different Institutes) and in terms of compatability with the universal goal of Full Employment (as every library has its own staff to enforce its own rules). Luckily some things are unified across libaries, like the library card you use to charge your books and the web-based catalogue.

In this catalogue I recently looked up a book about the history of urban planning in Taipei. The catalogue said: "1 copy ordered for the Taiwanese History Institute on May 15, 2000." So I traipsed over to the library of the Taiwanese History Institute and went up to the desk to see if maybe it had come in yet. (Expecting to hear the immortal line, “It’ll be ready Thoisday.”) The librarian typed various informations into her computer and replied: “Oh, yes, we do have a copy. It's just that after we ordered that book, the author himself presented us with a complimentary copy, so we cancelled the order. That’s why it’s still listed as on-order in the catalogue, you see.”