Retired LC Employee Makes A Generous Donation In Support of Asian Division's Research Fellowship And Other Activities

One of the many new programs and projects that the Asian Division has launched in the past two years is the establishment of the Asian Division Friends Society. The purpose of the Friends Society is to assist the Asian Division in strengthening its services, enhancing the library’s collections, promoting their use, preserving the knowledge and accomplishments of the people and civilizations of the Asian people, both past and present, as well as America’s historic and contemporary involvement with Asia.

How can the Asian Division use the outreach programs to strengthen its services and enhance the Asian collections? Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, Chief of the Asian Division, together with his colleagues and many supporters, have come up with an innovative way. To begin with, they created three gift funds - the first is to establish a research fellowship for graduate students and young scholars to conduct research on topics relating to Asian studies in the Asian Division’s Reading Room and to make extensive use of the LC collections; the second is to establish an internship for librarians from Asian countries every two years to work at the Asian Division as interns and to assist in the inventory and bibliographic description of unique and unprocessed Asian collections; and the third is to set up a gift fund for the acquisition of special Asian collections.

The gift fund idea really excited Florence Tan Moeson, a former cataloger in the Chinese Team of the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division for 45 years. She particularly likes the fellowship program because during her college years in China, it was a generous gift from an unknown scholar that fulfilled her dream of pursuing graduate studies in the United States and, subsequently, enabled her to work for the Library of Congress. "I am very lucky that I am in the position to pay back society," said Florence. "Contributing to the fellowship program, to help building the Asian collections, and to give the opportunity to young librarians to gain internship training in LC means so much to me."

Florence was born in 1927 in Guangzhou of a large family of eleven children. With so many siblings, there was very little chance for her to get a college education. Fortunately, a scholarship from a church group allowed her to obtain her BA degree from Jinling Women's College in Nanjing, China. Later she obtained another scholarship from the church that allowed her to travel to the United States in 1948 where she completed her MA in Education at Florida Southern College.

Because of her expertise in Chinese language and history, she was hired by the Library to catalog Chinese material in 1958. Florence loved her work life in LC. She recalls that her life was "constantly learning and reading. I read many good Chinese classics during that 45 year period. Also, the on-the-job library training allowed me to receive my Master's Degree in Library Science from the Catholic University easily while I was working for LC". Obviously, Florence is grateful to the Library in many ways.

As the Asian Division is launching many scholarly services and outreach programs that require funding and support, the entire Asian Division staff are very appreciative of Florence's very generous donation. Special acknowledgement of Florence's ten-year gift totaling $300,000, or $30,000 each year beginning in 2005 was officially made at the second Annual Membership Meeting of the Asian Division Friends Society held in the Asian Reading Room on April 30th. More than 200 members and friends attended the meeting and expressed their appreciation to Florence.