First Snow in Beijing

The first snow came to Beijing during the last night. I didn't remember such early snow in Beijing before.

NLC Aleph500 to be upgraded

Staff of National Library of China are preparing to upgrade its Aleph500 system in the next month. We are testing the test system and examining the parameter setting tables to ensure that all indexes have been considered.

NLC Scientifc Research Seminar held today

The Tenth NLC Scientific Research Seminar was held today in the new building of the National Library of China. There are 138 submitted papers and 56 papers selected for three levels of awards.

Today, about 150 staff attended the seminar and 8 award winners gave their presentations to the audience.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Last week, I watched the DVD of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, another musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Like Jesus Christ Superstar, it is also based on Bible (see Genesis, Chapter 37).

LSC Annual Conference to be held in Nanning

The annual conference of the Library Society of China (LSC) is to be held in Nanning during November 3-5, 2009. Nanning is a city in the Guangxi Autonomous Region and is also one of the Southernmost cities in mainland China.

We have just planned a joint open programme of the Information Organization Committee and the Resource Development and Sharing Committee of LSC. I will be one of the co-chairs of the programme, and will speak about the latest development of international and national cataloging standards.

Jesus Christ SuperStar

During the long holiday, I watched the DVD Jesus Christ SuperStar (Andrew Lloyd Webber) I bought recently in Shanghai. I bought another DVD several years ago, but the DVD has a problem of audio and video synchronization in the first half of the drama, and I was unable to view the whole musical at that time.

With new musical composition and stage performance  techniques, it doesn't lack expressiveness and tension, and reflects different aspects of human nature.

I like the movies The Passion of the Christ and the song "By the rivers of Babylon", which are also based on stories in the Bible. The text of the song is almost entirely derived from Psalm 137.

Photos of the IFLA Cataloguing Section in Milan

During the long holiday (October 1-8) for the National Day (October 1), I spent time to upload some photos of the IFLA Cataloguing Section (Standing Committee meeting and Open Programme) and the Division IV (Bibliographic Control) Open Programme during the IFLA General Conference in Milan to my personal website at the following URL:

http://www.bengu.cn/homepage/library/ifla_catsection_milan2009.htm

Actually, the Open Programme of the Division IV is the last one, because the new IFLA structure will be effective after the Milan conference. We didn't have our social hour this year, and celebrate the publication of IFLA Cataloguing Principles (in 20 languages) immediately after the open programme instead. During the reception, Barbara Tillett told me: "It is a hard job, but we did it." I am glad that the Chinese version is done by some Chinese catalogers and me. I saw our names in the Chinese part of the book.