As part of my ongoing immersion in Hong Kong culture, I watched Ip Man 4, the finale in a classic Hong Kong series of movies starring Donnie Yen. In one striking scene, Ip Man (1893-1972) flies across the Pacific and re-encounters his most famous student, a young Bruce Lee, in San Francisco. Martial arts, in Chinese culture, represents more than physical practice: it is a system of knowledge, a cultural inheritance, an evolving dialogue.
For those of us working across the Pacific Rim library community, this resonates more than it might first appear. Libraries too are custodians of disciplines of different kinds: intellectual, cultural, and technological. Like martial arts, they must constantly evolve without losing coherence or purpose. And whilst we are not as directly dependent on maintaining enough student numbers to feed ourselves, it is essential that we engage with our users to guarantee our funding support.
A Changing Landscape
AI luminaries, after a period of strong rhetoric about disruption, are now signalling that job losses may be lower than previously anticipated. Sam Altman, for instance, recently tempered earlier predictions of large-scale displacement and acknowledged that the ‘jobs apocalypse’ has not materialised (Time, 27 May). Studies from the United States in 2024-25 indicate that the AI revolution is more or less in step with previous revolutions, when it comes to impact on employment (The Budget Lab, Yale) This does not mean that we should be complacent, but it vindicates the notion that we need not catastrophise. There is plenty to do in our libraries, across the Pacific Rim, to ethically integrate AI, as we have integrated myriad new technologies in the past decades, empowering our users to navigate an information ecosystem that becomes ever richer and ever more complex. AI might add to the complexity, but it also holds the keys to enabling us to manage the challenges of this complexity where we are able to embed it responsibly in workflows, collections, and services.
Countless AI companies are emerging, whereas we see continued consolidation in academic publishing, illustrated by Wiley’s acquisition of Emerald, reminds us that structural change in the knowledge ecosystem continues apace. Our academic publishing partners understand that scholarly publishing is “a high-margin, recurring revenue stream”, like Matthew Kissner, Wiley President and CEO in the Financial Times. In a financially-pressurised higher education environment, can we justify our library subscription subsidizing high-margin commercial operation? On the one hand, the scale of research is increasing, output is growing and the burden of time on peer reviewers and editorial boards is growing. On the other, ownership of publishing outlets is concentrating; and the terms of access, reuse, and dissemination are being renegotiated in real time.
Taken together, these developments frame the question we should pose ourselves and all our stakeholders on how we, as a distributed community of libraries, exercise agency in shaping this future?
From Practice to Platform: Connecting to Progress
Our newly established Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are mechanisms to facilitate exchange and coordinated action in three areas identified by PRRLA members in discussions in 2025. This is where our work in PRRLA can help to tackle issues that feel timely and necessary to grapple with:
- AI
We will explore how we are embedding AI responsibly across our institutions: sharing practices, interrogating risks, and identifying opportunities for cross-Pacific collaboration. This will help us build a collective intelligence, and accelerate our understanding of the opportunities available to us all to support our users. I look forward to guiding our conversations in this group as CUHK will chair this SIG initially. - Digital Initiatives
As this group begins convening, a key focus will be the Pacific Rim Library (PRL), one of our signature initiatives (more on PRL below). The group is led by UCLA. The question we have to tackle is not simply how to build digital collections, and not even how to share them, but how to connect them, activate them, and position them as shared infrastructure. - Open Access (OA)
Led by Tsinghua University Library, this group will connect regional conversations into a more coherent whole. If consolidation is reshaping the publishing landscape, then collaboration must be our response. By aligning efforts across the Pacific, we can strengthen our collective position and move toward a more open, transparent, and trustworthy information ecosystem. We will also continue to strive to make the system better value for money.
Collections as Living Practice
Returning to Ip Man, what struck me was not only the choreography, but the underlying discipline, the years of practice embedded in every movement by both the actors and their original inspiration.
In our own context, collections are often perceived as static assets. But they are, in fact, living expressions of knowledge systems.
At CUHK, we recently restored and shared archival footage of another Cantonese master of martial arts, one of Ip Man’s contemporaries. These videos of Master Wong Hon Fan (1915-74) are available on YouTube and complement the rich holdings in our CUHK Digital Repository in the Praying Mantis Master Wong Hon Fan Collection.
Libraries do more than preservation: we help activate knowledge, bringing cultural and scholarly resources back into circulation in ways that serve research, teaching, and public engagement simultaneously. Across PRRLA, we hold countless equivalents: materials that are all at once scholarly resources, cultural artefacts, and sources of inspiration. The opportunity before us is to make these collections more visible, more connected, and more usable across borders.
An Invitation to Participate
Finally, I would encourage colleagues to engage with the broader ecosystem in which PRRLA operates. Looking to the past, if you searched for “martial arts” historical content in our PRRLA Pacific Rim Library, hosted at UCLA, you would discover items from Hong Kong, from UC Irvine and from Singapore.
Looking to the future, the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) Hackathon may be an area we can engage between our libraries and our parent institutions. The 2026 edition of the Hackathon on Financial Health Frontiers is progressing (deadline for application now passed). As PRRLA is affiliated with APRU, this is an excellent opportunity for us to encourage our academic communities students and colleagues alike to engage with interdisciplinary challenges at scale from 2027 and beyond.
Learn more about the APRU 2026 Hackathon
A Collective Discipline
If there is a single thread connecting these reflections, it is this:
Discipline, whether in martial arts, scholarship, or librarianship, is both individual and collective. It is honed locally, but it gains meaning through exchange with the world, adaptation to the environment, and feeling a sense of shared purpose with a community.
PRRLA’s strength lies precisely in our ability to bring together diverse institutions, across geographies and traditions, to act with coherence where it matters most.
The time ahead is shaped by disruptive trends, but I believe it will be defined by how we respond together, rather than the disruption we face. The future looks bright: we have a committed Steering Committee and a dynamic and dedicated Secretariat in place for PRRLA. And we have this Discussion Board as a means to bring together conversations for our members.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with you.