Harvard, National Library of China Embark on Digitization Project
| Among the largest cooperative projects of its kind ever undertaken between China and US libraries, the project will digitize Harvard-Yenching Library's entire 51,889-volume Chinese rare book collection. One of the libraries which make up the Harvard College Library system, Harvard-Yenching is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. When completed, the project will have a transformative affect on scholarship involving rare Chinese texts, Harvard-Yenching Librarian James Cheng predicted. Scholars come from all over the world to use our rare book collection because many of these titles are not available anywhere else, he said. "I think this project will be a huge contribution to scholarship by making these materials available to a much broader audience. We need to change the mindset that rare materials must be kept behind closed doors. A library is not a museum. We need to begin making these materials available to scholars, and the best way to do that is through digitization." The six-year project will be done in two three-year phases. The first phase, beginning in January 2010, will digitize books from the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, which date from about 960 AD to 1644. The second phase, starting in January 2013, will digitize books from the Qing Dynasty, which date from 1644 until 1795. The collection includes materials which cover an extensive range of subjects, including history, philosophy, drama, belles letters and classics. Excerpted from http://hcl.harvard.edu/news/articles/2009/china_digitization.cfm |