Digital libraries: Scholars to digitize rare Asian book collection

Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and the National Library of China will digitize a collection of 50,000 books, some more than 1,000 years old, to make them available to scholars and historians worldwide. The Chinese side is to offer financial support for the initiative. The six-year joint project of the Harvard University Library and  the National Library of China will computerize volumes in the Harvard-Yenching Library located at the Harvard University Library , the West's largest amasser of academic books for East Asian research.

The endeavor will put the contents from thousands of rare, delicate volumes within the grasp of researchers, James Cheng, the Harvard-Yenching librarian, said in the statement. The project will also help preserve old books by limiting the time they spend outside protective climate conditions, Cheng said. "A library is not a museum," Cheng said in the statement. "We need to begin making these materials available to scholars, and the best way to do that is through digitization." It is worth mentioning that about 30 percent of the titles in the Harvard-Yenching collection are not available anywhere in China.

The project is supposed to be implemented in several phases. The first phase of the project will digitize books from the dynasties of Song (960-1279), Yuan (1206-1368) and Ming (1368-1644). The books range in age from 450 years to more than 1,000 years.

The second phase will concentrate on books from the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911) that take the collection up to the end of the 18th century.