It was heartening to read that the late James Wong Jim's doctoral thesis on the history of Canto-pop music will soon be at the centre of a student-led translation project, from which an English-language publication may eventually emerge. Unfortunately, for all those Hong Kong people who are quite capable of reading it in its original Chinese, it will continue to remain beyond their reach. Why? Because Wong's thesis is safely locked in the impenetrable depths of the University of Hong Kong's library, and public access is severely restricted. It is almost impossible for anyone other than current or former students or staff of Hong Kong's universities to gain reading access to any of the city's publicly funded university libraries. We are not talking about the right to borrow material - we are talking about the basic right to walk through the door, sit down and browse the thousands of academic books and journals that are housed in the university libraries, paid for by public funds. Over a number of decades of historical and educational research in Australia, Britain, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia, I have never had a university library door slammed in my face until I came to Hong Kong. In most of the libraries I have visited overseas, this right of access was automatic, no questions asked. I just walked in off the street. In one or two places, I have been asked to show some form of personal identification, but no one has ever questioned my basic right to enter. And I felt welcome. Here, the wealth of scholarship contained in our universities' libraries lies behind an MTR-like turnstile for which I have no ticket. I could make an appointment with someone beyond those who guard the entry points, and pay thousands of dollars each year for a guest membership, but why should I? As a tax-paying resident of a city with freedom-of-information legislation, I see this lack of library access as an outright denial of a fundamental right. How can people in Hong Kong pursue the espoused goal of 'lifelong learning' if they are denied access to the fruits of local and overseas scholarship in this manner? As a distance-mode doctoral student of an Australian university, I am forced to arrange inter-library loans of books and pay for photocopies of articles to be sent to me by mail. Yet, so many of these publications exist just metres from my grasp on the other side of the heavily policed entry barriers to our local university libraries. It is doubly annoying that my research subject is an important aspect of Hong Kong's English language education and that some of my photocopy requests have had to travel from Hong Kong to Australia and back again. The research work of Hong Kong postgraduate students such as Wong will probably never be read by anyone other than locally enrolled Hong Kong students. Masters and doctoral research on Hong Kong topics will continue to languish in obscurity, because no one outside the exclusive 'club' of university readers will ever know they exist. Surely, this defeats the purpose of postgraduate research, which is to extend global knowledge and understanding by incremental steps. I would love to know what postgraduate research has been conducted here in my field of research, but I will never hear about it unless its findings appear in professional, refereed journals to which I have overseas access. How can Hong Kong claim to practise 'academic freedom' when it denies the public's right to read what local and overseas academics have written? It is a sorry state of affairs when Hong Kong's English language teachers, who are preparing to take the benchmarking examination, are denied the right to consult the English language teaching journals to which they have been referred in the benchmarking syllabus. From the turnstile arguments I have had with people on 'guard duty' in these libraries, it would appear that they fear some sort of invasion by secondary school students. Is this a good enough reason to deny even limited access to bona fide readers? University libraries in other places seem to manage their younger readers without problems. How can Hong Kong continue to perpetuate this kind of educational privilege for the few? I would love to hear a legal view on the legitimacy of this. Pauline Bunce is a humanities teacher at an international school.
