Chi Wang

Chi Wang
Panel member at Freer Gallery on 11 November 2012
Alma mater	University of Maryland
Occupation	Co-chair of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation

Dr. Chi Wang is Co-chair of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation. The Foundation supports various activities through its Committee for U.S. Libraries and Museum Exchange. He is also a professor of U.S.-China relations and modern China at Georgetown University.

Prior to his current positions, Dr. Wang was the head of the Chinese Section at Library of Congress (LC), had worked in the field of librarianship for forty-eight years before retiring from LC in October 2004.

Wang began his career at LC in 1956 to work on a microfilm project. In 1958, he became a cataloguer in the newly established Far Eastern Languages Section where he was asked to head up an innovative project to use a machine that the Library just purchased from Japan to produce catalog cards with CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) scripts, which put the practice of hand-copying CJK characters to cards to an end: quite a technological breakthrough at the time.

Shortly after his appointment in the Far Eastern Languages Section, the LC received funding from the National Science Foundation to strengthen its Asian collections in science and technology. Wang, who had a college degree in agriculture from the University of Maryland, was recruited by the Science and Technology Division to supervise its Asian Science Unit. In that position, he helped the Library to develop a core collection of science and technology in CJK languages, which later became one of the most comprehensive such collections outside of Asia.

Wang also compiled three important bibliographies in the 1960s: 1) Chinese Scientific and Technical Serial Publications in the Collections of the Library of Congress, 2) Mainland China Organizations of Higher Learning in Science and Technology and their Publication: a Selected Guide, and 3) Nuclear Science in Mainland China.