Poets + Libraries = Something good

My newest entries:

Libraries
Lib4u
Renchinii Choinom
Danzan Ravjaa
and Information Content

This last week was good in the sense that I worked with two topics that I particularly care about: poetry and libraries. The two poets listed above, Renchinii Choinom and Danzan Ravjaa, just sort of came out of the blue for me while I was looking for information on other things. I figured I shouldn't pass up the opportunity to help the world know more about these two, especially since it appears that it is next to impossible to find much of their work in translation.

Danzan Ravjaa is quite an interesting figure to learn about since he led such a crazy life. He went from being a poor singing boy begging with his father to a literary monk who established, quite possibly, the first public school in Mongolia-- in addition to monasteries and a public theater. He was considered extremely principled and is still appreciated today for his poetry. He also wrote an operetta that apparently takes almost a month to perform and is ten volumes long. And surprisingly, to me anyhow, he belonged to a branch of Buddhism that allowed monks to drink and have sex (he was apparently fond of both). He had a suspicious death, probably by poisoning. After his death his collection of manuscripts and relics (his own writing among them) continued his life's odd journey. When the communists took over and started gutting monasteries a family of "Curators," with a lineage that going back to a friend of Danzan Ravjaa's, buried the items in numerous crates in the mountains. Only in the early nineties were some of them excavated and put on display. The British Library's Endangered Archives Programme sponsored the creation of a digital image collection of unique documents from this cache.

I also got a hold of Krystyna Matusiak, a digital librarian at UW-Milwaukee. She took part in a newspaper digitization project in Mongolia also funded by the Endangered Archives Programme and has given me some more information on the elusive Mongolian Press Institute, which will be helpful. Look for an article on her experience in Ulaanbataar in a fall issue of Serials Librarian.

Working on the "Libraries" entry has been good as well, since I keep coming up with new information. I think that it is probably the longest article so far, and it might be a good idea to split it up into separate headings for the different kinds of libraries. I'm still curious about libraries outside of Ulaanbataar, though, if they do exist, clearly they are not substantial.

I came across two web 2.0 resources that may be useful down the road. A Library and Information Science Wiki and the Facebook Library 2.0 Interest Group.

Currently reading: Travels of an Alchemist by Chang Chun, recorded by Li Chi-chang, translated by Arthur Waley. It is an account of a famous Daoist master, Chang Chun's, overland trek from Shandong Province to the Hindu Kush to meet with Chinggis Khan.

Continuing with the human side of the knowledge society I plan to put in entries relating to education this week. Some already exist from another contributor, though they focus largely on education for those with disabilities. I look forward to finding out more about the government's Non-formal Distance Education program, especially considering the unique challenges it faces in Mongolia.