Compiling a bibliography is a thankless but necessary task. In the field of East Asian numismatics, Arthur B. Coole and Howard F. Bowker published bibliographies on the subject in the 1940's. In later years, they worked together with Kozono in Japan, and in 1967 together published an updated bibliography, as Volume 1 of Coole's Encyclopedia of Chinese Numismatics. This work recorded about 2,400 titles of books and articles in all languages on the numismatics of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Tibet and Southeast Asia.

In the 1970's Pat Hogan in Iowa City, Iowa began keeping a file card record of newly published works as a supplement to Coole's bibliography. In 1975 Pat convinced me to take over the task. I made file cards for everything in the Coole-Bowker-Kozono bibliography and then began adding what has been published since. By the 1990's I had recorded 10,000 works, and decided to limit my efforts to just China. I have now recorded something over 8,000 books and articles on Chinese numismatics. Once I finish going through the numerous numismatic magazines published in China, there will certainly be 10,000 titles.

So far this bibliography is only arranged by author and as such is of limited usefulness. I had started to enter these works in a software program which would allow them to be sorted by subject, but that program and the computer are both obsolete now and can not be used. So I would like to ask the readers to recommend a software program which will allow me to sort these works by subject. It must be powerful enough to handle over 10,000 records, and ideally would accept Chinese characters. Also, if some serious person or persons would like to take over the recording of works on other areas of East Asia, I would be willing to make copies of my file cards on those areas.