Digital Projects in Taiwan
by Jing Liu ~ July 29th, 2008. Filed under: Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librariship.Very impressive! Taiwan U’s 淡新档案，National History Museum’s art works can be searched by image (content-based retrieval). Prof. Chen used searching butterflies as an example. National Repository of Cultural Heritage has tons of old photos, ancient contracts and multi-media resources.
Yunshan was telling me how difficult to find anything like this from the Mainland, such as modern dance, which reminds me about the request for paintings sold recently by auction. Chinese government protects the competition among digital content providers for profit making, not encouraging cultural heritage preservation and digitaization, lacks of high quality and free digital projects for its 1.3 billion people and the rest of the world. Taiwan’s success, I think, is because of its wide social application and open attitude.
Mr. Wang and Ma followed up my question. Prof. Chen said that she didn’t care about money at all, and is happy to see those projects, if not growing, still exist. Library school students no longer care about traditional operation, but keen on working for .com companies or digital projects. She only picked graduate school students who are innovative or creative. Huayi, Hanzhen and Bokelai are all commercial providers. The challenge is how to balance between OpenAccess and commercialization. Taiwan spent 5 billion purchasing overseas, but not selling its knowledge and publications out. Taiwan has about 20,000 ebooks ready by the end of this year.
