Asian Research Library Series 3 A Catalog of the Asian Research Library Collection of the Literacy Education Materials Formerly Owned by the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO, 3

The Asian Research Library is the newest library at the University of Tokyo, having opened on the fourth floor of the General Library in October 2020, and as its name suggests, it is a specialized library that supports research on all regions of Asia. The staff, who are researchers specializing in Asia, are directly involved in its operations and are engaged in the transfer of materials related to Asian studies that have been scattered throughout the university, the purchase of further materials, the accession of donated materials, digitization, and so on.
 
The book introduced here is a catalog of the collection of literacy education materials that were donated by the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU), one of the collections held by the Asian Research Library. It is a sequel to A Catalog of the Asian Research Library Collection of the Literacy Education Materials Formerly Owned by the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO, 1, which has already been introduced on this website (https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/biblioplaza/ja/H_00176.html), and is the final volume of the catalog. The character of this collection and its value as research material have already been fully explained in vol. 1, but here I would like to reiterate what we wrote then.
 
This collection, which was donated by the ACCU in 2014, is a corpus of materials related to literacy education activities that were energetically pursued by the ACCU in the Asia-Pacific region from the 1980s. It consists of 3,487 items collected in twenty-five countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and in addition to teaching materials published by governments or NGOs and materials jointly developed by the ACCU and specialists in each country, it also includes reference materials on the Centre’s projects and activities as a whole. These are teaching materials intended for out-of-school (non-formal) education of adults who have difficulties in reading and writing.
 
The materials are wide-ranging in content, including not only materials purely for learning how to read and write and do simple arithmetic, but also materials relating to the nourishment and health of infants, maternal and child health, practical knowledge about agriculture, fisheries, and factory labour, and the raising of awareness about social problems such as sexual discrimination, environmental pollution, and forest preservation. The materials were all designed so as to be directly helpful for improving the everyday lives and raising the income of the users. Furthermore, the collection consists of not only books and booklets but also posters, picture-story shows, board games, DVDs, toys, and other learner-friendly teaching materials. The collection thus not only has value from a pedagogical viewpoint but would also seem to have great value from a variety of other perspectives, such as the contemporary history and cultural history of the countries concerned, linguistics, and so on, and it is to be hoped that researchers will make active use of the collection.
 
The present volume is a catalog of 1,381 items in eighteen languages from seven countries in South Asia, namely, Bangladesh (422 items), Bhutan (68 items), India (301 items), Sri Lanka (103 items), Maldives (37 items), Nepal (203 items), and Pakistan (226 items), as well as some other materials (21 items), the cataloguing of which was completed in fiscal 2022.
 

(Written by KAWASAKI Yutaka, Assistant Professor, Research Advancement Section for the Asian Research Library / 2023)