Zhijia Shen, Co-author with Charles E. Chamberlin
The University of Washington Libraries seeks to be an international leader in imagining, creating, and realizing the promise of the 21st century academic library. Making local resources available globally through regional, national, and international collaborations and digitization programs has been an important goal of the Libraries. In the past years, the Libraries have undertaken a number of major initiatives in this area, including WorldCat Local, digitization of special collections, and Chinese librarians summer institute. The latest is a collaborative project of Chinese rare-book digitization. This overview will present the strategic planning and vision of the University of Washington Libraries on providing global access to local resources and our collaboration with the National Central Library (NCL) on Taiwan in digitizing our special Chinese rare book collection to make it available globally. In its 100 years of teaching about Asia, the University of Washington has built one of the nation’s oldest and very special library collections on East Asia. The Chinese rare book collection includes publications of the Ming Dynasty and many rare local gazetteers of areas in Southwest China. The NCL has extensive experience in digitizing and presenting through the Internet digitized Chinese materials. The UW-NCL cooperative digital project will create a digital copy of over 1000 titles of this special collection, which will be made available via the Internet to users any time, any place.
Presentation [PPT]