Located on the first floor of Doheny Memorial Library, the East Asian Library supports the educational and research needs of faculty and students of East Asian studies. While the library supports scholarship in multiple disciplines, its greatest focus is in the humanities and social sciences.
USC has maintained a collection of resources related to East Asian studies since the 1920s, but the collection truly began to grow in the 1940s, when World War II sparked renewed interest in the region. The East Asian Library was formally established in 1989. Today, the library is built around three core collections: the Chinese Collection, the Japanese Collection, and the Korean Heritage Library.
With comfortable chairs, an abundance of natural light, and expansive views of the McCarthy Quad, the library's reading room is a popular study space among students. The reading room is also home to the library's reference books and current journals, as well as a selection of newspapers from China, Japan, and Korea. In addition to breakout rooms for group study, the library offers multimedia workstations, including computers with full support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters.
The East Asian Library's emphasis on Korean holdings makes it unique among libraries of its kind. The 65,000 volume Korean Heritage Library accounts for approximately forty percent of the library's holdings, compared to five to ten percent at a typical East Asian library in North America.
Among the specialized research collections preserved by the library is the impressive East Asian Map Collection, which documents how Western perceptions of the region have changed over time. Part of the map collection, the David Lee Collection, was originally compiled to document how the term "Sea of Korea" was applied to the body of water between the Japanese archipelago and the Asian mainland. (The sea is often referred to, controversially, as the "Sea of Japan".)
Reference books in the East Asian Library
Newspapers from China, Japan, and Korea are available in the library's reading room.