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such as Lo Hsiang-lin's collection, have greatly enhanced its value. The closest thing to a one-stop resource centre, the Hung On-To Library has undoubtedly benefited scholars in their pursuit of the study of Hong Kong, enabling the study to grow and mature
The Hong Kong History Workshop
In the 1970s, a History Workshop was established at the History Department, HKU, at the initiative of Alan Birch, to facilitate practical work in a historiography course. Local historical materials were collected and collated for students to use as primary sources to gain hands-on experience of how history is written. The ground work was laid primarily by Carl Smith who worked there in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, when the Department began teaching Hong Kong history to undergraduates, and the historiography course was dropped, the History Workshop, now more focused on Hong Kong, was renamed the Hong Kong History Workshop, but one of its main functions remains the training of historians. Besides the department's own students, it also offers information and advice to staff and students from other departments of the HKU, researchers from outside of the university and from overseas. It facilitates research by discovering archives and private holdings, by preparing tools such as bibliographies, catalogues and indexes, and by building up a network of historians working on Hong Kong.
The Emergence of Local Scholars
While these institutions were being set up to create an infrastructure to facilitate research, an equally significant development occurred - the emergence of locally-educated scholars studying Hong Kong. In the 1960s, a few postgraduate theses on Hong Kong history were produced at HKU, the most notable work on local history is Peter Ng's Master's thesis which reconstructs the history of the Hong Kong region from the Xin'an county gazetteer. But 'local scholars' only began to exert real influence in this area when some of them began teaching and publishing on Hong Kong history and carrying out systematic and large-scale research. One of the first was Ng Lun Ngan-ha, who, after completing her M.A. degree at HKU in 1967, proceeded to Minnesota for her Ph.D. degree. Both her theses and her first book dealt with Hong Kong. Other scholars were to follow. Being brought up in Hong Kong, these scholars are able to handle both English and Chinese sources while benefiting from different