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Asian and Pacific-Islander Americans
Scope
This overview focuses on materials in the Library of Congress' collection concerned with peoples from Asia and the Pacific islands who reside within the United States. Many of the publications deal principally with the history of these groups in the United States beginning with the arrival of Chinese sojourners in the mid-1800s, and cover all subject areas excluding clinical medicine and technical agriculture. Histories of local ethnic communities and the World War II evacuation and relocation of Japanese-Americans classed in United States military history are included in this overview.
Size
Items within the Library's general book collection related to Asian- and Pacific Islander-Americans number approximately 3000 while its serial publications number approximately 200. In addition, there are extensive non-classified holdings in this area in the Library's general microform collections, including a large number of monographs and serials, and thousands of doctoral dissertations. The Library's Asian Division holds numerous publications in Asian languages specifically concerned with Asian immigrants in the United States.
General Research Strengths
The Library's status as the nation's copyright deposit library has meant that the Library's collections have historically been more eclectic and more democratic than many comparable academic research institutions. Although publications that are strictly vanity press materials are normally excluded from the Library's collections, the Library has distinguished (and historically continuous) collections of mass-market fiction and magazines, self-help, humor, and advice books, popular philosophy and theology, as well as a collection of comic books.
Foreign materials held by the Library are useful not only for the study of U.S. culture from foreign perspectives, but also for comparative studies of U.S. and other historical, national, and regional cultures.
Areas of Distinction
The collections are especially strong in the areas of history, ethnicity, and immigration studies, particularly for the larger Asian American groups: Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans and Korean-Americans. Extensive collections of government documents, both historical and contemporary, provide useful primary data. The Serial and Government Publications Division has custody of the newspapers of the ten Japanese American relocation camps microfilmed by the Photoduplication Service, and the Prints and Photographs Division has numerous images from these camps available in its Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection.
The Microform Reading Room holds several thousand dissertations completed at U.S. institutions on different Asian and Pacific Islander American groups and several important collections related to Japanese Americans: Archives in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo, Japan, 1868-1945 and Papers of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocations and Internment of Citizens: Numerical File Archive.
Weaknesses/Exclusions
Smaller, more recent immigrant groups are not as well-represented in the Library's collections; this is especially true of Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans from South Asia (India, Pakistan) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand). The Library has made special efforts to acquire some of these materials, but many larger and commercial publishers have not, until recently, produced works on these groups, and it is difficult to identifying and acquire publications from ethnic presses with small press runs. Serial publications produced by community organizations or local associations are also lacking.