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HONG KONG INILERSITY
ADVISOR
COMMITTEE
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No. 4KLAC21
UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
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of the
BRIEF NOTE ON THE LIBRARIES
The
1. Chinese Library The Fung Ping Shan Library is counted
a good one. We have the Chinese classics, the Dynas tic Histories and the Encyclopædia in the best modern editions and have been ever since about 1912 collecting books of contemporary writers; poets, essayists and novelists. Library is housed in a reasonably well planned building given by a local Chinese family and it has from a like source a small endowment for purchases. There are good reading rooms and an ample supply of periodical literature. It is a condition of the gift that the library is open to the Chinese public. In fact it has become one of the major libraries or Southern China both in its scope and in the degree in which it has begun to draw gifts of books and manuscripts from Chinese donors.
1. General Library. This is the weakest section of the whole.
There is a good selection of books covering the range of English Literature but there is need of considerable expenditure on standard editions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatists and of XVI - XVIII century poets. Standard collections of the Essayists and early novelists (Ballantyne, for example) are needed. A chief defect is in journals: Sets of anglia, Engliche Studien and Modern Language Notes are needed. Full sets of the publications of the Early English Texts' Society,
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of the Scottish Texts' Society, of the shakespeare Societies and of the alone Society are needed. reference books as the Dictionary of National Biography, the Encyclopaedia Brit,, the New English History, the English Dialect Dictionary are available.
Normal
The Library is relatively well supplied with modern work on Chinese, apanese and Far Eastern History and affairs, but is deficient in anything but the obvious works on modern European and American history. In modern works on the history of India and the Arab world the Library is very deficient. The same is true for Colonial and
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