As a result of acquisitions during the past year the University of Pennsylvania Library (Philadelphia) now has copies of the great majority of Western works of fundamental importance in the Chinese field, with the exception of volumes which are out-of-print and some of the more expensive art publications. In addition, several thousand works in Chinese also have been acquired, thus providing a promising start toward the assembly of a comprehensive collection of books in that language.
According to Mr. C. Seymour Thompson, university librarian, the first steps toward strengthening the collections in the Chinese field were taken in the autumn of 1938 when the university started a greatly enlarged programme of Oriental studies in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Coincident with the establishment of that programme, the university received a grant of $15,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation for the development of Far Eastern studies and for the acquisition of books on China, and it is this grant which is making possible the expansion of the special collections.
How rapid that expansion has been, Mr. Thompson pointed out, may be seen by a comparison of the university's past and present collections with the number of books and periodicals of fundamental importance in the Chinese field as contained in "A Union List of Selected Western Books on China in American Libraries."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.