The East Asia Library(EAZ), following the leadership of the University of Washington(UW) Libraries and the trends of the library world, has made great progress in library automation. Yet the presence of non-roman scripts, or CJK characters, in the library's electronic resources in an environment dominated by phonetic languages makes automation of East Asian Libraries more challenging than libraries which use only roman scripts. This paper first provides a general overview of current information technology. It then offers a brief introduction to the UW Library automation and how the East Asia Library handles automation Finally, it presents the experience of the information technology in Chinese studies at EAL.