Digital curation for cultural and intellectual assets : a Taiwan perspective

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)INTRODUCTIONDigital information on the Internet is massively increasing and having significant impacts on people in many areas, such as education, recreation, research and culture. The generated information is not as safe and eternal as people may think. The long term survival of information is at risk because of many factors such as technology obsolescence and technology fragility (Harvey, 2010); therefore, it is essential to preserve, manage and use information.Digital curation can be defined broadly as the appraisal, digitization, management, preservation and use of, as well as value addition to assets for short-term and long-term use (Wikipedia 2016a). According to the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to research data throughout its lifecycle (Digital Curation Centre, 2008). The range of research data is quite broad, including government information, scientific data, and cultural and intellectual assets.Over the past two decades, due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies, there has been a rapid growth of digitization projects around the world aiming at preserving important cultural and intellectual assets. Through digitization and dissemination over the Internet, cultural and intellectual assets can be more readily available to the public.This article shares the experience of the National Central Library, Taiwan, in curation, specifically in two collaborative projects. The first project seeks international cooperation for digitizing Chinese rare books; the second project collaborates with government agencies and libraries in Taiwan for digitizing Chinese books published in the twentieth century, especially during the period of 1911-1949.INTERNATIONAL DIGITALIZATION PROJECT OF RARE BOOKSSince 2002, the Taiwan National Central Library (NCL) has been digitizing important collection resources as part of the government's National Digital Archives Program, which were later renamed Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program (n.d.). The types of digitized publications include rare books, local government documents, and periodicals and newspapers. Other content includes rubbings of stone inscriptions in Taiwan, news programs, genealogies and thesis papers (National Central Library, 2012).As the national library of Taiwan, the NCL owns a rich and important collection of Chinese and Taiwanese documents. As many Chinese rare books are scattered around the world, it is desirable to collect these books together and provide a comprehensive online resource to support Chinese studies. To that end, the NCL initiated the International Digitalization Project of Rare Books in 2005 for digitizing Chinese rare books owned by overseas institutions. On the one hand, NCL can strengthen its Chinese collection through the collaborative digitization; on the other, the collaboration partners can produce quality archives of their Chinese rare books by leveraging NCL's rich experience in digitizing Chinese rare books.NCL investigated the collections of many national libraries, academic libraries and cultural institutions around the world, and invited those which owned abundant and distinctive ancient Chinese books to participate in the project. The partner institutions include the U.S Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. By 2015, 3,226 titles and a total of 1,852,100 images had been digitized. Table 1 lists the collaborative partners and the number of books digitized by each partner.NCL started the collaboration with the Asian Division of the Library of Congress in 2005, and until 2012, the project had completed 2,025 titles, comprising 1,032,401 images. …