Recognized for his distinguished contributions and services to the advancement of Chinese-American librarianship, Cal State L.A.’s Yongyi Song—a technical services librarian at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library—was recently selected for the Chinese-American Librarian Association’s (CALA) Distinguished Service Award.
The CALA Distinguished Service Award is given annually to individuals who consistently demonstrated outstanding leadership and achievement in library and information services at the national and/or international level.
A native of Shanghai, Song is well-known within the academic community of China studies. He has long devoted himself to preserving the true history of China’s Cultural Revolution and combating government censorship through myriad publications, including bibliographies and source books. Song was twice jailed by the Chinese authorities—once during the Cultural Revolution for organizing an underground reading club, and again in 1999, for collecting primary sources on the revolution.
Among his many books and articles, Song is a coauthor with other librarians of several books and monographs, The Cultural Revolution: A Bibliography, 1966-1996 (Harvard-Yenching Library, 1998), Chinese Cultural Revolution Database and Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign Database online and CD-ROMs (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002-2010), The Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cultural Revolution (Scarecrow, 2006), and Database of Chinese Great Leap Forward and Great Famine, 1958-1962 (Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, 2013).
Song received a master’s degree in library and information science from Indiana University at Bloomington in 1995, a master’s degree in Oriental literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1992, and a bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Institute of Education in 1981.
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Working for California since 1947: California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 235,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six Colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to the Honors College for high-achieving students. Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu
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