讣告：华美图书馆界领袖卢国邦先生逝世

After a short and brave fight with cancer, Karl Lo, retired Head of the IR/PS (International Relations and Pacific Studies) Library and East Asia Collection at the University of California, San Diego, passed away on Feb. 21, 2007 in San Diego.

Karl’s professional career was marked by distinction and a unique, pioneering spirit. In the field of East Asian librarianship, his broad interests in technologies and their application to information processing were the hallmarks of his approach to solving the problems of multilingual, multimedia information transfer and storage.

Karl received his Bachelors degree in Chemistry at the Chung Chi College, Hong Kong, in 1958. He received his Masters degree in Library Service at Atlanta University in 1960. After briefly serving as bibliographer, he quickly became head of the East Asia Library at the University of Kansas from 1959-1968. He later served as the head of the East Asia Library at the University of Washington from 1968-1990 where he began his work in Chinese script conversion to Romanization. Karl was appointed as Honorary Professor at Northwest Normal University, Xian, China in 1982, and Consultant at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in 1987. He was awarded various grants such as the DOE grant for the East Asian Librarians Workshop in 1988.

As the director of the IR/PS Library and East Asia Collection at UCSD from 1990 until his retirement in 2002, Karl did his most prolific work in the field of multilingual information processing. He promoted international technical and political cooperation to bring about shared information and materials between the libraries of the Pacific Rim. He made active forays to meet with key international players in US, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and South Korea and to bring these leaders to San Diego to bridge legal, technical and cultural gaps that were hindering the open sharing of digitized and non-digitized materials. This activity laid the foundation of what is now taken for granted as part of the general globalization of information sharing itself. As one of the original founders, he spearheaded the formation of PRDLA (the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance), a highlight of many “firsts” in his tenure as librarian, and which now has the membership of 31 academic libraries across the Pacific Rim region.  He won the competitive National Security Education Program grant in 1995 for developing a multilingual computer server to provide ready international access via the Internet to online information in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. Some of these materials utilized the resources of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He was a self-taught programmer and developed a Wade-Giles to Pin-yin conversion tool that was used by many institutions and librarians.

His reputation for being a progressive leader in the field of East Asian librarianship made him Acting Chief of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress from March through September 2002.

He served as Chair of the OCLC-CJK Users Group, President of the Association of Librarians at the University of Washington, President of the Friends of the Kingsgate Library (Kirkland, WA), and Board Member of the San Diego Chinese Historical Society.

Karl has various publications in the fields of East Asian colletion development, such as the study of Chinese Newspaper collection, library automation, and internet access to the CJK materials.

We lost a friend, colleague, pioneer, mentor, and a dedicated librarian. However, Karl’s vision, dedication, professional integrity, innovative spirit, motivational talents and, above all, disarming modesty, will live forever.

Jim Cheng, Head

International Relations and Pacific Studies Library/East Asian Collection

University of California, San Diego

9500 Gilman Drive, 0514

La Jolla, California, 92093-0514

Tel: (858) 534-7788 Fax: (858) 534-8526

E-mail: jicheng@ucsd.edu