Introduction

Hi, I'm Barry Ernst, CLM at Briarwood. I will be travelling to Beijing, China in November and visiting the National Library of China (NLC) as QL Exchange Librarian. I will be accompanied by my old friend, Ron Wan, Adult Supervisor at Flushing. I've known Ron for years and we were both Managers at Brooklyn Public Library. Also our kids both went to Stuyvesant HS at the same time. Right now I'm trying to learn more about the history and culture of China. I'm reading two books. Did you know that the Great Wall of China might not have actually been built until the 1300's. No one is quite sure when it was actually erected. I am also trying to learn some Mandarin. I'm getting some homeschooling from my 11 year old daughter Sara who speaks some Mandarin and Cantonese. She has been very patient with me, since I am a very poor student. Our responsibilites other than representing QL will be to make a presentation about our library, visit various libraries in the Beijing area and maybe some collection development. We hope to evaluate materials that our Chinese speaking customers would be interested in and might not presently have access to. If you know of any area we should look into, please reply. Areas of course that should be big will be business and I was thinking also subjects like geneaology. I plan on talking to some of the Div. heads plus staff at IRC before we go to find out about reference questions they have gotten that we have had no material here in QL on. I also would like to look into the NLC databases to see what they have and if their information resources would be available to Queen's residents. Well that's it for now. I have to go back on the desk. I will try to update you from China whenever I can and would appreciate your comments.