APSIG newsletter no. 63: March 2007

Karl Lo, in memoriam

Karl Lo, a well-known figure to the Australian Chinese, Japanese and Korean library community, died in February in San Diego.

Karl did pioneering work at the National Library with Linda Groom and the National CJK Service team in the 1990s on the automated conversion of ABN records with old Wade-Giles Chinese romanisation to the new Pinyin standard.

Karl's professional career was marked by distinction and a unique, pioneering spirit. In the field of East Asian librarianship, his broad interests in technologies and their application to information processing were the hallmarks of his approach to solving the problems of multilingual, multimedia information transfer and storage.

Karl received his Bachelors degree in Chemistry at the Chung Chi College, Hong Kong, in 1958. He received his Masters degree in Library Service at Atlanta University in 1960. After briefly serving as bibliographer, he quickly became head of the East Asia Library at the University of Kansas from 1959-1968. He later served as the head of the East Asia Library at the University of Washington from 1968-1990 where he began his work in Chinese script conversion to Romanization. Karl was appointed as Honorary Professor at Northwest Normal University, Xian, China in 1982, and Consultant at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in 1987.

As the director of the IR/PS Library and East Asia Collection at University of California San Diego from 1990 until his retirement in 2002, Karl did his most prolific work in the field of multilingual information processing. He promoted international technical and political cooperation to bring about shared information and materials between the libraries of the Pacific Rim. He won the competitive National Security Education Program grant in 1995 for developing a multilingual computer server to provide ready international access via the Internet to online information in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. Some of these materials utilized the resources of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He was a self-taught programmer and developed a Wade-Giles to Pin-yin conversion tool that was used by many institutions and librarians.

His reputation for being a progressive leader in the field of East Asian librarianship made him Acting Chief of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress from March through September 2002.

Karl had various publications in the fields of East Asian collection development, such as the study of Chinese Newspaper collection, library automation, and Internet access to the CJK materials.

(Marie Sexton, Jim Cheng)