TCDL Bulletin Digital Library Projects in TaiwanHsueh-hua Chen AbstractThe development of national-level digital library projects in Taiwan began in 1998. The initial project the Digital Museum Project (DMP), sponsored by the National Science Council (NSC) included several topic-based projects and technical support projects. After three phases of the DMP had been completed, the five-year National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) was launched in 2002. The main goal of the NDAP program is to promote and coordinate content digitization and preservation in leading museums, archives, universities, research institutes, and other organizational content holders in Taiwan. This paper focuses on the development of the DMP and NDAP, including their background, organization and functions, outcomes, and research-related issues. This paper also describes some obstacles and challenges of digital libraries that may influence the effectiveness of digital library development in Taiwan. I. IntroductionThe impact on human societies of various fast-developing information technologies has been studied for a long time. These studies have led us to believe that we are now facing critical cultural and social changes changes in the means of communication from printed materials to electronic documents, and changes in lifestyle. Information technologies provide people many opportunities to digitize cultural treasures and heritage objects so they can be preserved and utilized in the digital era. Otherwise, some of them might gradually become inaccessible or lost entirely. Realizing the importance of digital content, the National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan initiated pilot projects in 1998 to study the feasibility of digitizing national cultural holdings. The first such project was the Digital Museum Project (DMP), which lasted from 1998 to 2001. Dozens of universities and research organizations participated in this project [1]. After three phases of the DMP had been completed, a five-year National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) was launched in 2002 with support from the NSC. The main goal of this national program has been to promote and coordinate content digitization and preservation in leading museums, archives, universities, research institutes, and other organizational content holders in Taiwan. The NDAP is also a sub-project of e-Taiwan, which belongs to a higher-level national development project in Taiwan. In May 2002, the Executive Yuan of Taiwan proposed "Challenge 2008", a comprehensive six-year national development plan to foster creativity and cultivate talent among the Taiwanese people and to transform Taiwan into a "green silicon island". The plan is estimated to cost NT$2.6 trillion (approximately US$75 billion) [2]. Among the ten identified major development areas in the "Challenge 2008" plan is the construction of Digital Taiwan (e-Taiwan). The e-Taiwan project aims to adopt information and communication technologies for developing Taiwan into a new knowledge-based economy, upgrading the competitive advantages of local industries, establishing a highly efficient government, and promoting a high-quality information society [3]. This paper focuses on the development of the DMP and NDAP, including their background, organization and functions, and outcomes, and on the research-related issues of digital libraries. This paper also describes some of the obstacles and challenges facing digital libraries that may influence the effectiveness of digital library development in Taiwan. II. Digital Museum Project in TaiwanThe main goal of the Digital Museum Project (DMP) was to integrate and establish several topical or technology-based digital museums that focus on disseminating cultural and educational content via information technology to the general public and students in Taiwan. The DMP project was divided into three phases.
III. Background of the National Digital Archives ProgramThe first phase of the NDAP (http://www.ndap.org.tw) was launched on January 1, 2002, and is a 5-year program spanning the period from 2002 to 2006. This program, also sponsored by the NSC, is to promote and coordinate content digitization and preservation at leading museums, archives, universities, research institutes, and other major organizational content holders in Taiwan. The goals of the NDAP are designed to accomplish the ultimate mission of preserving cultural heritage and sustaining cultural development activities in Taiwan. The goals are to [6]:
There are nine institutions who are participating in the NDAP, including: Academia Historica, Academia Sinica, National Central Library, National Museum of History, National Museum of Natural Science, National Palace Museum, National Taiwan University, Taiwan Historica, and Taiwan Provincial Consultative Council. More organizations, public or private, are anticipated to join the effort to contribute to this program in the future. The NDAP budget for the first five years is $339, $368, $530, $638 and $645 million NTD, respectively, (approximately $10.3, $11.2, $16.2, 19.5 and 19.7 million USD). The second phase of NDAP will start in 2007 and covers the period 2007 to 2011. It is estimated that the budget for the second phase will be higher than the first phase. IV. Organization and Functions of the National Digital Archives ProgramThe organization and functions of the NDAP are shown in Figure 1, which includes three components: 1. Program Office, 2. Institutional Projects and 3. Non-solicited Projects [7].
1. Program OfficeThere are five divisions in the Program Office: 1. Content Development Division, 2. Research and Development of Technology Division, 3. Applications & Services Division, 4. Training & Promotion Division, and 5. Operations Management Division. These divisions will jointly carry out the overall planning organized by the Program Office, build common infrastructures, and establish general content processing guidelines and specifications for all participating institutions and non-solicited projects. 1.1 Content Development DivisionThe primary tasks of the Content Development Division are to:
The Content Development Division also plays a major role in setting up a content development strategy for future projects, establishing working standards for potential participants, and working out a mechanism for the division of labor for participating institutions. The Content Development Division invites representatives who participate in the NDAP to form the OAI testbed team, to construct the union catalog of the national digital archives with OAI-PMH, and to handle system technology. 1.2 Research & Development of Technology DivisionThe main purpose of the Research & Development of Technology Division is to carry out the plans of the program office and to pursue research and development efforts for many aspects of digital archives technologies. This includes the:
1.3 Applications & Services DivisionThe Applications & Services Division, which serves as a bridge between the content holders and digital content industries, is designated to fulfill the utilization goal of sustaining digital preservation activities, promoting digital content industries and improving creativity and productivity. This division has four major missions:
1.4 Training & Promotion DivisionThe Training & Promotion Division organizes training courses, conferences, and workshops for participants of the NDAP projects as well as for librarians, archivists, and people from industry. In order to promote the use of the end products of NDAP, the Training & Promotion Division conducts several workshops for elementary and high school teachers. An instructional design contest is held each year, and the contest winners are invited to demonstrate their works. The division also attends the Taipei International Book Exhibition and conducts promotional activities with the media. Objectives of those activities are to:
1.5 Operations Management DivisionThe Operations Management Division assists the NDAP Program Office in various administration matters. The major functions of this division are to:
2. Institutional ProjectsThe Institutional Projects are conducted by major content holders and providers of digital resources in Taiwan. There were nine participating institutions, including Academia Historica, Academia Sinica, National Central Library, National Museum of History, National Museum of National Science, National Palace Museum, National Taiwan University, Taiwan Historica, and Taiwan Provincial Consultative Council. These institutions hold national cultural heritage and collections, and take leadership positions in different areas. Digitizing their archives not only preserves cultural treasures, but it also facilitates new applications to be developed for these collections and cultural holdings. 3. Non-solicited ProjectsNon-solicited Projects are those projects selected from proposals submitted to open Request-for-Proposal (RFP) announcements. From 2002 to 2006, 282 projects were selected, including: 90 for digital content development, 51 for technology research and development, 86 for various applications of digital archives, and 55 for creative learning (see Table 1).
Content Thematic Groups & Technology Working GroupsIn order for the NDAP to progress efficiently, the Program Office has provided a common mechanism for coordination, technological support and personnel training. In the coordination aspect, 16 thematic groups and 6 working groups were formed in 2005. The thematic groups provide a coordination mechanism to solve problems arising in digitizing and managing collections in the respective areas. The themes supported by these 16 groups are: Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Archives, Artifacts, Botany, Calligraphy & Painting, Chinese Classics Full-text Database, Geology, Journalism & Mass Media, Linguistics, Maps & Remote images, Rare Books, Stone & Bronze Rubbings, Video, and Zoology. The six working groups for technology are: Reference Platforms for Digital Archives, Naming and Distributed Searching, Formats of Digital Objects and Archives, Digital Archives Services, Multimedia Digitization Process and Multilingual Information Processing. These working groups meet on a regular basis to discuss technology-related issues associated with building human-centered, scalable, interoperable, and cross-culture systems. These discussions enable specialists in the social sciences and humanities to create, access and use digital contents, and enable general users to browse, learn, and enrich their intellectual content, and hence improve their quality of life. V. Outcomes of the National Digital Archives ProgramThe end products of the NDAP will be collected into the "Taiwan Digital Archives (TDA)." The digital resources in the TDA are divided into three levels: the archive level, the open-market level and the public information system level. The resources of the archive level are for preservation purposes and are accessible only on a case-by-case basis. The resources of the open-market level are to be released (subject to some costs) for commercial use, from which value-added digital content and digital services can be developed. The resources of the public information system level are for educational purposes and are free of charge for public consumption. Figure 2 illustrates a scenario of what the NDAP considers the derived benefits of the TDA to be [8]. In the future, besides preserving the national collections, promoting Taiwan's cultural holdings, and encouraging information/knowledge sharing among the organizations holding content and citizens, the NDAP will continue to promote new applications and services over content collections and cultural holdings. By using digital resources of TDA, the NDAP can then achieve the goal of developing a content rich and creative society, promoting industry and economy that boost creativity, productivity and quality of life in Taiwan.
VI. Research Related IssuesThe different aspects of digital library research have been considered to be very important for supporting the functions of both of the national-level digital library projects the DMP and the NDAP. The DMP was composed of two types of project: topic-based projects and technology support projects. The major research work was carried out by technology support projects that covered different areas, including: geographic information systems, word net, metadata, copyright management, digital watermarking, and digital library evaluation. Among these areas, the author participated in and led a metadata research team, ROSS (Resources Organization and Searching Specification), to study metadata-related issues and to design metadata suitable for Chinese materials. The ROSS team also developed an XML/metadata management system known as Metalogy [9]. The NDAP supports research projects on many aspects of digital libraries, and these projects are carried out mainly by the Research & Development of Technology Division. This division has provided technical services for over 50 content projects, including services for metadata analysis, standards development, database development, systems analysis, systems development, and follow-up maintenance; has enabled successful technology transfers to local companies and government organizations, including a new Chinese word segmentation method to the Institute of Information Industry, a missing Chinese characters input and presentation technology to the Electronic Data Processing Center, Executive Yuan, and the video archive construction technology to Acer Inc.; and has completed over 40 technical papers on digital archives infrastructure, information retrieval, and multimedia content management. In the past three years, the research and development efforts have focused on intellectual property, global resources discovery, interoperability, metadata, multilingual information retrieval, communication networking, multimedia technology, information security authentication and integrated services [10]. The NDAP also supports some application development research projects that are being carried out mainly by the Applications & Services Division. These projects address commercialization-related issues. This division has interviewed several key commercial companies within the digital archives-related industry in Taiwan to understand the difficulties and challenges they face and to find solutions for them. In early 2005, the Applications & Services Division proposed a virtual industrial park to promote and create agglomerated economy of digital archives. This virtual industrial park provides a hub for transactions involving the products of digital archives and for licensing digital objects for commercial use. VII. Future ChallengesWith the rapid advancement of information technologies and the increasing number of Internet users, an increasing number of museums, galleries, libraries, archives, universities, research institutes, and other organizational content holders are and will be involved in the NDAP. As cultural digital archives have been growing dramatically in size and variety, an industry built around the construction and application of digital archives is gradually taking shape. It is therefore very important for the NADP to identify business models for the cultural digital archives industry. From the discussions with approximately 150 companies that participated in the various national digitization programs in Taiwan, the Applications & Services Division has summarized five categories of business activities. They are (1) digital archives data bases, usually in Web-accessible form, (2) integrated data bases, usually on a specific subject such as paintings or plants, (3) products from creative reproduction of digital objects, (4) digital content services delivered through hardware devices, and (5) digitization technologies, software, and services. To be successful in developing the digital archives industry in Taiwan, the challenges will be:
References[1] National Digital Archives Program Office (2004). National Digital Archives Program 2004. National Digital Archives Program Office, Taipei, Taiwan. p.2. [2] Council of Economic Planning and Development (2002). Challenge 2008 National Development Plan (in Chinese), pp. 155-201. Retrieved September 28, 2006, from Council of Economic Planning and Development. Available from <http://www.gio.gov.tw/taiwan-website/5-gp/glance/ch11.htm>. [3] Council of Economic Planning and Development (2002). Challenge 2008: The Six-year National Development Plan. Retrieved September 28, 2006, from Council of Economic Planning and Development. Available from <http://www.gio.gov.tw/taiwan-website/4-oa/20020521/2002052101.html>. [4] Chen, Hsueh Hua, Chen, Chao Chen (2001). "Metadata Development for Digital Libraries and Museums Taiwan's Experiences." Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001, October 25-26, 2001. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan: 200-207. [5] Digital Museum Project Extension, National Science Council (1999). National Science Council Digital Museum Project summary: Digital Museum Project Extension, National Science Council (In Chinese). Retrieved September 28, 2006, from <http://mars.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~dlm/plan/1st/intro12.htm>. [6] National Digital Archives Program, Taiwan. National Digital Archives Program. Retrieved September 28, 2006, from <http://www.ndap.org.tw/index_en.php>. [7] National Digital Archives Program Office (2004). National Digital Archives Program 2004. National Digital Archives Program Office, Taipei, Taiwan. p.3. [8] National Digital Archives Program Office (2004). National Digital Archives Program 2004. National Digital Archives Program Office, Taipei, Taiwan. p.5. [9] Chen, Hsueh Hua, Chen, Chao Chen (2001). "Metadata Development for Digital Libraries and Museums Taiwan's Experiences." Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001, October 25-26, 2001. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan: 200-207. [10] National Digital Archives Program, Taiwan. Research & Development of Technology Division. Retrieved September 28, 2006, from <http://www.ndap.org.tw/1_org_en/p_research.php>. [11] Ministry of Economic Affairs (2002) Enhancement of Digital content Industry Development Promotion Plan. Taipei: The Bureau. © Copyright 2006 Hsueh-hua Chen Top | Contents |