Undertaken by two Austrian scholars, Dr. Monika Lehner and
Dr. George Lehner, both of whom are experts with Chinese
rare books, Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 is a project that aims at
collecting information and links of freely available e-books
on China and Sino-Western encounters from various open
access repositories.
The Institute of Oriental Cultures, University of
Tokyo, has a collection of over 100,000 volumes of
Chinese rare books. The Institute has selected the
most precious titles of the collection, digitized
them and made the contents accessible through the
portal of The Chinese Rare Books Full Image
Database. Currently, this database provides free
access to full images of over 4,000 Chinese rare
books and partial access to some 600 rare book titles.
VIA is a growing online union catalogue at Harvard
University Library, documenting the arts, material
culture,
and social history. It contains descriptive records and
images representing paintings, sculpture, photography,
drawings, prints, architecture, decorative arts, trade
cards, rubbings, theater designs, maps and plans from
participating archives, museums, libraries, and other
collections throughout Harvard University. Included are
thousands of digital images on China, Japan, and Korea.
BuddhaNet is a nonsectarian organization aiming
to link up with the growing worldwide culture of
people committed to the Buddha's teachings and
lifestyle. Without focusing on any sect's beliefs
or practices, its website provides a diverse
variety of quality resources about Buddhism in
general, including a World Buddhist Directory,
BuddhaZine-Online Magazine, Insight Meditation
Online, and the Buddhist eLibrary. In particular,
the Buddhist eLibrary is set up to support the
free dissemination of digital Buddhist educational
materials around the world.
The e-Asia Digital Library is a digital collection
developed by the University of Oregon Library. The
project aims to build \a collection of digitalized
e-books and a database of full text web resources\
to contribute to research and scholarship on East
Asia, while not duplicating nor displacing printed
traditional materials. The focus is on East Asia,
including China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea (South
and North). It currently holds over 4,000 items.
The goal of the Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies
[IDEAS] is to unify digitizing efforts already in progress
at various campuses into a shared searchable database,
open
to anyone with access to the World Wide Web. IDEAS focuses
on the generally underrepresented area of Asia in an
attempt
to make multi-media materials more widely available for
specialists and non-specialists alike. IDEAS is the first
multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, pan-Asian
searchable
database in the country.
This database has been developed by the Academia Sinica of
Taiwan, and is an important online tool to look for
bibliographic and holdings information for Chinese Local
Gazetteers. The database is based on the Union Catalogue
of Chinese Local Gazetteers published in 1985 by the
Academy of Sciences in mainland China, which contains
bibliographic information for 8,200 local gazetteers
compiled before 1949 and currently held by 190 libraries
and institutes across mainland China. In addition, the
database also collects the information of over 2,000 New
The online database, Christian Sources in New Local
Gazetteers of China, is the result of a seminal project
undertaken by the Hong Kong Christian Council and Hong Kong
Spirit Seminary College (of the Roman Catholic Church). The
database specializes in delivering digitalized Christian
sources excerpted from the New Local Gazetteers of China,
published between the 1980s and the 2000s. It covers
Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Nestorian and Judaic sources
as are recorded in the New Local Gazetteers of various
administrative levels.
The Ricci Roundtable is a database developed and maintained
by the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History
at the University of San Francisco for the use of academic
research on the topic of Christianity in China. The database
has a strong collection of archival, bibliographic and
biographic resources on the history of Christian missions in
China during the past few centuries.
Chung Sai Yat Po was published in San Francisco from Feb.
1900 to 1951. It has a long publishing history and almost
all its issues survived. It provides readers important
sources about the history of Chinese immigration in the
first half of the twentieth century. The collection includes
14 microfilm reels and 1,460 online items. Selected issues
can be viewed on the website.