Chinese Rare Books Digitalization Project

The mammoth digitalization project entitled “A Digital Library of Chinese Rare Books” was a three-year collaborative effort supported by the Foundation that commenced in January 2007. This project drew on the strengths of four of the world’s most renowned sinological libraries: the Fu Ssu-nien Library, Academia Sinica; the Library of Congress; the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University; and the East Asian Library and Gest Collection, Princeton University. The four libraries involved in this effort each digitized their own holdings from an agreed-upon list of Chinese rare books, and developed a collaborative digital library of these works based on the Fu Ssu-nien Library’s existing digital library and metadata schema.

An enormous amount of images from the four libraries can be easily accessed, including the Library of Congress (96,030 pages), Harvard-Yenching Library (96,138 pages), East Asian Library and Gest Collection (97,020 pages), and the Fu Ssu-nien Library (96,469 pages). Bibliographic work proposed by the Fu Ssu-nien Library has also been finished.