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A mirror into the past amidst old books
In One Needs to Get Out, Jiang Xun mentions The  Small Sea Travel  Diaries by Yu Yonghe; he quotes Yu Yong-he, relating the story of the latter seeing aborigines who had been made to pull a cart, and were being left to get drenched in the rain. He asked: "Why don't you let them stay out of the rain under the eaves?", and his interpreter told him" They're actually just like animals, they don't mind getting wet." Yu Yonghe heaved a sigh and said "They're people too." Jiang Xun used this diary, published in the 17th century, to describe how people can use differences in culture to reflect upon themselves.

The dissemination and interpretation of old stories has produced much wisdom and insight; The Small Sea Travel Diaries and the Sulphur Gathering Diary are actually the same book. As the book was republished as shorter stories, there are some slight disparities in the structure and content of the book. It was written by Yu Yong-he, whose pen name was Cang Lang, from Renhe County (modern Hangzhou County). He lived there for his entire life, and was known as the "Scholar." As "it is impossible to travel without meeting obstacles", he once travelled widely. The Small Sea Travel Diaries primarily records the reason for his crossing the sea to Taiwan, the date of his voyage and everything he saw and heard on his journey. Although 300 years have passed since the book was published and the information it contains may be long since "out of date", reading the book today, there is still a lot of information worth reading, knowledge which has not gone stale, the value of old books, refracted by the lens of history, is refined into a variety of crystals filled with wisdom.

Image: Head Librarian Curator LIU CHENG-YUN at the interview

Information related to life in ancient times can be found in old books and documents; LIU CHENG-YUN, head of the Fu Si-nien Library is also fond of them. When he was head of the Grand Secretariat Archives Project at the Institute of History and Philology, he wrote a paper called "The Stories Within the Archives", in which he wrote "After trying a few topics, such as the relationship between husband and wife, peddlers, and inns, I discovered that the cases in the files were still attractive, but that I needed to be able to thread them together with a theme if I was to be able to use them to tell stories, like scattered pearls on the ground, which must be strung together before they can become a beautiful necklace." n Lin was seconded to the National Palace Museum for 3 years in 2001, over which time he served as Curator of the Books and Documents Area, and was in charge of files and rare books. When his secondment ended and he returned to the Institute of History and Philology to serve as the head of the institutional project, we at the TELDAP e-newsletter were honored to invite him to share his rich experience of digitizing rare books and documents.

The Characteristics of the Fu Si-nien Library Collection

The collection of the Fu Si-nien Library is largely comprised of Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing books, mainly original texts, of which there are around 4,000, totaling over 40,000 bound volumes. They include anthologies of the works of many famous people, including printed books, written manuscripts, and volumes of calligraphy, among others. There are also over 140, 000 thread- bound volumes, mostly those published in the Qing dynasty and early Republic, which are mainly hisotrical material and collections. Of these, there are around 20,000  local jouranls which give summaries of the natural, and cultural changes in various localities,making up the shortcomings of formal history so they are important research materials. In order to achieve the two aims of "archiving" and "using" them, the gates for digitizing high-quality materials in libraries were opened in 1988, which both prevented rare books suffering damage through use and also made accessing them more convenient for the reader, allowing them to be searched quickly. In order to make resources available for sharing, make education more accessible and promote culture, the Institute of History and Philology offiically allowed their materials to be used to compile databases, including the Ancient Rare Book Archive System, Collected Seal Database and Famous Person and Authority Database established by museums and libraries. At present, these three  databases allow the user to search almost 30,000 books and scanned images in black and white, and up to 2,150,000 pages in colour, which are provided for individual research, academic users, publishers, and public collections, and other groups which can apply to use this service.

We have entered the era of digitization, and in the face of the wave of ever-changing  e-readers, the reader is no longer limited to computer interface readers, but can choose the platform they prefer or are used to, such as an iPad or a mobile phone. The Specialist Digital Archive and Knowledge Database was actively established in response to this trend in 2008, hoping that through serving as the basis for a digital education database, the library's collection of rare books could be transformed through using modern information technology, producing new information resources, and actively providing digital content related to the user's life through the application of technologies related to WEB2.0 and the establishment of digital platforms. Changes in information technology will take the knowledge accumulated by past scholars and, by merging it, transforming it and using it in a creative fashion, will reorganize it and use in in an active fashion after adding value. The main trend in libraries establishing databases is choosing texts which have already been digitized and are relevant to the lives of users, or selecting editions from the archives, transforming them into eBooks, while simultaneously joining them to a previously- established ancient collection system, database of famous people, seal database, or other related metadata or printed sheet, expanding the digital content of every archive system.