Scholars to digitize rare Asian book collection

Harvard University 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 project will computerize volumes in the Harvard-Yenching Library, the West's largest amasser of academic books for East Asian research, according to a statement from Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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."

Furui Zhan, director of the Beijing-based National Library of China, said about 30 percent of the titles in the Harvard-Yenching collection are not available anywhere in China.

Among the most prized items in the Harvard holdings is a volume of an encyclopedia called the Yong Le Da Dien, he said.

The tome dates from about 1512, said Sharon Li-shiuan Yang, head of access services for the Yenching Library.

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, according to the statement.

The books will be digitally photographed at a rate of about 100 pages daily, and Harvard and the National Library of China will each get a copy of the images, said William Comstock, head of imaging services for the Harvard College Library, adding that the text of the pages won't be searchable by computer, he said.

The National Library of China's role in the project will primarily be financial support, Zhan said.

"It's a multimillion-dollar project," said Beth Brainard, a spokeswoman for Harvard's library system.

She declined to give a more specific figure. "It's difficult to pin down because it's part services and part cash," she said.

Harvard has made cuts in its library system to cope with losses in its endowment, the world's biggest academic fund.

The endowment dropped about 30 percent in the fiscal year ended June 30, to about $26 billion, after investment losses and payouts to the university.

The fund provided more than a third of the university's budget in fiscal 2009, Harvard President Drew Faust said on Sept 25.

Bloomberg News

(China Daily 11/30/2009 page10)