a professional bibliographer, editor and  for Western-language reference works on Asia since 1969, is the author of numerous annotated bibliographies and scholarly guides, the compiler and editor of the bibliographical journal Doctoral Dissertations on Asia from 1975 through 1996, and a longstanding contributor and since the mid-1990s an associate editor of the 910,000 entry online Bibliography of Asian Studies of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has also been a consultant to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution for the volumes on East Asia (China, Japan, Korea and Mongolia) and on Southeast Asia (Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) that appeared in the Center's series Scholars' Guides to Washington, D.C., a member of both the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Association for Asian Studies (1983-1986), an officer (including vice-president) of the Mid-Atlantic Region/Association for Asian Studies throughout most of the 1980s, the president of the Library of Congress Asian Division Friends Society in Washington, D.C. between 2004 and 2009, and a lifelong member of the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) of the AAS.