The proliferation of knowledge, and all that brings

After five years, the time has come for us to split the East Asian Research and Bibliographic Methods course. It's come a long way since I first taught it solo--not only has our number of majors and minors doubled, but the material we need to cover, thanks to the digital age, has also increased exponentially. This past year it became downright unruly, as those of you who took it know, even without trying to squeeze in Korean studies. So, we've decided to bid good-bye to an era and split EAS205 into EAC205 and EAJ205.

Bibliography is something usually taught at the graduate level, so structuring the undergraduate curriculum is tricky. In addition to the linguistic limitations, we also face library limitations. That is to say, we don't want to flood the curricula with information about materials that are not readily available to UAlbany students.

A final consideration is that the materials are increasingly dynamic because they are largely electronic, not on paper. Whereas "methods" courses in graduate schools were relatively static for decades, now the materials change so rapidly that the curricula have to be reviewed and revised on a constant basis.

Personally, I think that it is important to include both the "old" paper materials and the new electronic resources. Both are important to master if one is to be truly proficient in East Asian Studies. I know that there is some resistance on students' parts to learning some of the more arcane aspects of bibliographic method, that they think those skills are obsolete (or soon will be). But in the same way that knowing the multiplication tables is important in a world of pocket calculators, knowing how to find a character in a paper dictionary is important.

So although students should stay tuned for some big changes on the horizon, the fundamentals will live on.