[KS] Frank and Anna Shulman - retirement and projects

[Robert Provine]

Frank Joseph Shulman and Anna Leon Shulman have announced their plans
to retire at the end of December following many years of professional
involvement in the "Bibliography of Asian Studies" (BAS) of the
Association for Asian Studies. Anna began her work as an associate
editor for East Asia of the BAS in 1985 and has served full-time as
its editor since 1993. Frank worked as an assistant editor between
1970 and 1972, subsequently served the BAS as a consultant, and has
worked more than half time since the mid-1990s as one of its associate
editors. Together they have sought to provide the community of
scholars, students and librarians engaged in Asian Studies with
authoritative bibliographical coverage of Western-language
publications in virtually all academic disciplines (ranging from
Anthropology, Economics, and History to Literature, Politics, and
Science &Technology) and in various Western languages about North and
South Korea as well as about China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, Mongolia,
the Russian Far East, Taiwan, Tibet, East Asia as a whole and Asia as
a regional entity.

During the past fifty years, they have witnessed, participated in, and
through professional collaboration with their colleagues helped lead
and direct a number of developments that transformed the BAS from an
annual printed bibliography of the books, articles and chapters in
edited volumes published during a single year to a cumulative,
periodically updated, increasingly annotated database of over 935,000
bibliographical entries on East, Southeast and South Asia. This, as
they have stated, could only be accomplished with the support and
ongoing cooperation not only of their colleagues but also of many
academic libraries -- in particular, the University of Maryland
College Park Libraries -- and of editors, publishers and librarians
around the world.

Upon their retirement, Frank and Anna Shulman will refocus their
energies on a number of long-term projects. The first one involves
finishing up a multivolume bibliography of some 15,000 studies
entitled "The First Century of Doctoral Dissertations on Korea,
1903-2004: An Annotated Bibliography of Studies in Western Languages
Concerned in Their Entirety or in Part with Korea Accompanied By Notes
about the Academic Backgrounds and Master's Theses of Many of the
Authors", which the University of Michigan Press has agreed to publish
upon its completion. This work will be the latest in a succession of
book-length bibliographies of dissertations that they have published
since 1970 on Japan and Korea, China and Inner Asia, Hong Kong, Burma,
Malaysia, and South Asia. A 280-page overview of this bibliography
that includes 150 representative entries is available as a pdf file
upon request. Following its completion, they expect to direct their
attention to organizing and placing under some form of bibliographical
control their Asian Studies Newsletter Archives, a paper-based
collection of ephemeral newsletters and bulletins issued from the late
1960s to the early 2000s that was started in the 1970s and that also
deal in part with Korea. Many of these publications are useful
resources for documenting the development of Asian Studies and the
activities of numerous faculty, students, administrators and members
of the general public.

Frank and Anna Shulman will continue to reside for the time being in
College Park, Maryland, near the campus of the University of Maryland.
They may be contacted by e-mail at:  fshulman at umd.edu, and through the
U.S. mail at:  9225 Limestone Place, College Park, MD 20740-3943
(USA).