The founding librarian of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University. Born March 11, 1898 and died November 13, 1977. Alfred Kaiming Chiu studied the traditional Confucian curriculum and interned in a bookstore in his hometown Zhenhai, Zhejiang province, then went on to study in a modern school and enrolled in the first class that would graduate from China's initial library school in Wuhan, Hubei province. He received his B.A. degree from the Boone Library School at Boone University , later called Huazhong or Central China College in January 1922.
After graduation he became the founding librarian at Amoy University in Xiamen, Fujiang province, and it was here he came into contact with Japanese culture, studied the Japanese language, and increased his knowledge of Chinese literature and bibliography. He traveled to the United States, first for advanced study in library science and later, graduate work in economics. In 1924 he attended the Library School of the New York Public Library where he received a diploma. A year later he enrolled at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, majoring in agricultural economics while working as a volunteer at Widener Library on the Cambridge campus. He was awarded the master and doctorate degrees in 1927 and 1933, respectively.
In January 1927 when Harvard's librarian offered him a full-time position processing Chinese and Japanese language materials at the college library, he happily accepted and proudly began his career as what we called now a subject librarian in the East Asian field. He served as the founding librarian at Harvard-Yenching Library until 1965, and accepted as the consultant responsible for creating a new East Asian Library at the Univeridsty of Minnesota the following year, and became the founding library director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1967.
Drawing upon the experience and knowledge gained in China and the United States, Chiu devised a unique classification scheme for Chinese and Japanese books, which was subsequently adopted by many American libraries with collections in East Asian vernaculars. This scheme, commonly known as Harvard-Yenching classification, had definite advantages in handling traditional literature and scholarship. It was, however, less well adapted to the treatment of contemporary subjects. Beginning in the early 1970s, as the Library of Congress (LC) printed catalog cards became widely available, more and more East Asian collections using that classification scheme have shifted to the LC system. While the Harvard-Yenching scheme has now become a historical term, it dominated all aspects of East Asian librarianship for over half a century.
In additional to his pioneering work at Harvard, Chiu was also personally involved in building library collections at two other campuses: the University of Minnesota and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He first determined the objectives of the library, set up collection development guidelines, and finally worked out strategies for acquiring materials. His philosophy was that a collection policy should reflect the educational needs, subject strengths, regional conditions, and long-range plans of a particular library. The Minnesota program became a model for many East Asian libraries in the United States which were established in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the vision and leadership he provided at the new Hong Kong institution constituted a cornerstone for the future growth and development.
Another of Chiu's accomplishments had been the training of young librarians. In the 1930s he invited a group of bright young people with expertise in Chinese studies to Harvard for training and work. Most of them were instrumental in building subject collections or serving as area specialists in East Asian studies in the various types of libraries in the West.
Last but not least among Chiu's contributions as a librarian are his many academic and professional publications. A bibliography of his published works compiled by 1965 lists 50 titles. His monumental work, A Classification Scheme for Chinese and Japanese Books, was published by the American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, D.C., 1943. His Cataloguing Rules for Chinese Books, published in 1931 by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, had been used as a textbook by library schools and as a working tool by librarians throughout China for decades. His articles dealing with East Asian librarianship have appeared in such professional journals as ALA Bulletin, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Library Journal, and Library Quarterly. One year before his death, Chiu presented a paper entitled "Chinese Rare Books in the Harvard-Yenching Library" at the 28th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto, 1976. The paper shed new light on connoisseuship and on the subject of panbenxue, studies of editions. Quite appropriately, it reflected his life-long love of Chinese books.
Dr. Alfred Kaiming Chiu often remarked somewhat ruefully that an academic librarian who is not a scholar risks the contempt of his colleagues on the faculty, while a librarian whose greatest love is scholarly research will probably neglect his responsibility as a librarian. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of his career was his successful balancing of those potentially contradictory elements. Thus he was not only a distinguished librarian but, at the same time, a scholar's scholar and a librarian's librarian--and above all, a whole and very human person. (William Sheh Wong, Asian Studies Librarian, University of California, Irvine).