As a graduate student, you will have access to the University's wide range of resources including libraries, museums, galleries, digital resources and IT services.
The Bodleian Libraries is the largest library system in the UK. It includes the main Bodleian Library and libraries across Oxford, including major research libraries and faculty, department and institute libraries. Together, the Libraries hold more than 13 million printed items, provide access to e-journals, and contain outstanding special collections including rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, art and printed ephemera.
The University's IT Services is available to all students to support with core university IT systems and tools, as well as many other services and facilities. IT Services also offers a range of IT learning courses for students to support with learning and research, as well as guidance on what technology to bring with you as a new student at Oxford.
Oxford's libraries have a large collection on materials on East Asia. For Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, the Bodleian Chinese Library in the Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre, the Bodleian Japanese Library in the Nissan Institute, and the 'Window on Korea' Library in the Nizami Ganjavi Library in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies are most useful, together with the Eastern Art Library in the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library.
For Chinese, there is also the Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre Building (hereafter China Centre) which has a dedicated library. The China Centre Library holds books from the Bodleian Library's China Collection. The Bodleian Library has been collecting books in Chinese and on China since the early seventeenth century and presently contains one of the largest collections in Europe.
The ‘Window on Korea’ project - sponsored by the National Library of Korea - has provided the Bodleian Library with many volumes and provides around 200 volumes per year. The National Library of Korea also provided funding to help create a Korean Studies Library. This has expanded the collection as well as bringing all necessary Korean materials (reference, newspapers, teaching, audio visual and research materials) into one location at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
The Weston Library houses the Korean collection of pre-modern books and manuscripts and the Bodleian intranet system maintains subscriptions to most of the key online databases, eg DBpia, KISS, KRpia and KSI e-book. The Korean collection possesses the Bishop Mark Trollope Collection (from the nineteenth century and earlier), the Monsignor Richard Rutt Collection (mid to late twentieth century), and the earliest translations of the New Testament into Korean by John Ross in the 1880s.
For Japanese, the Nissan Institute houses the Bodleian Japanese Library, the University’s research collection of Japanese books. The first known accession of Japanese printed material was three volumes printed by Hon’ami Kōetsu’s press at Saga, Kyoto, c.1608-15.
There are also rare printed volumes produced by the Jesuit press in Japan (Kirishitan-ban) before they were expelled in 1614 as well as log books by William Adams (1564-1620), the first Englishman known to have visited Japan. The collection grew with Western-language publications on Japan from the seventeenth century onwards, and as an active research library serving the Oxford community, there is also an extensive and expanding modern collection.
There is also the Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, which functions as an umbrella for research activities related to Japanese language and linguistics through the University. The centre serves as a forum for publicising teaching, lectures, seminars, and other activities of interest to Japanese linguistics, and as a point of access to information for prospective graduate students interested in Japanese language and linguistics.
Adjacent to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies is the Ashmolean Museum, which houses superb Chinese, Japanese and Korean collections, and the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library, which houses an extensive collection on the art history of East Asia.
You will have access to the University's centrally provided electronic resources, the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies' IT Officer, and other bibliographic, archive or material sources as appropriate to the topic. There is a computing room for the use of graduate students in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as a common room where tea and coffee are available and staff, and students can meet.
