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This paper aims to provide a theoretical guide for preserving ancient books in China.

The paper reviews the history of the damage and preservation of ancient books in China, and analyzes the value attributes of ancient books: archaeological value, historical value and artistic value.

The paper proposes a preservation framework for Chinese ancient books. This framework is composed of three layers. The foundation layer is to preserve the physical entity of ancient books so that the archaeological values are preserved. The middle layer is to preserve the intellectual content of ancient books so that the values for historical research are preserved. The top layer is mainly about preserving the productions process of the artistic format of ancient books, so that not only the static artistic formats are preserved, the techniques and procedures to produce the artistic format are preserved as well.

The paper presents a framework that connects the value attributes of ancient books and the strategies to preserve those values, systematizes them and presents them as a whole. The framework can be used to justify government policies and help identify pitfalls in the preservation strategies for ancient books.

The purpose of this paper is to present a system for recognition of location names in ancient books written in languages, such as Chinese, in which proper names are not signaled by an initial capital letter.

Rule-based and statistical methods were combined to develop a set of rules for identification of product-related location names in the local chronicles of Guangdong. A name recognition system, with functions of document management, information extraction and storage, rule management, location name recognition, and inquiry and statistics, was developed using Microsoft's .NET framework, SQL Server 2005, ADO.NET and XML. The system was evaluated with precision ratio, recall ratio and the comprehensive index, F.

The system was quite successful at recognizing product-related location names (F was 71.8 percent), demonstrating the potential for application of automatic named entity recognition techniques in digital collation of ancient books such as local chronicles.

Results suffered from limitations in initial digitization of the text. Statistical methods, such as the hidden Markov model, should be combined with an extended set of recognition rules to improve recognition scores and system efficiency.

Electronic access to local chronicles by location name saves time for chorographers and provides researchers with new opportunities.

Named entity recognition brings previously isolated ancient documents together in a knowledge base of scholarly and cultural value.

Automatic name recognition can be implemented in information extraction from ancient books in languages other than English. The system described here can also be adapted to modern texts and other named entities.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Geographic Information System (GIS) in the development and utilization of Chinese ancient local chronicles to achieve the mining and visualization of historical data about products distribution and dispersal in Products in Local Chronicles of Guangdong.

Using 1,756 records of product-related location names in Products in Local Chronicles of Guangdong of the Qing dynasty, which are recognized by a name recognition system, as attribute data; taking the spatial data of Chinese administrative geography of the Qing dynasty in 1820 and the Historical Atlas of China as spatial data; connect the attribute data with relevant spatial data based on the table connection function of Arcmap in Arcgis 8.3 to implement the data management, cartography and analysis.

The application of GIS in the development and utilization of ancient local chronicles was quite successful. With some thematic maps, knowledge about products distribution and dispersal in ancient books was vividly displayed so as to facilitate relevant researches.

Only product-related location names inside China were analyzed, not other named entities in local chronicles; and only static visual display was achieved, not dynamic visual display. Historical maps of the world can be used to carry out the visualization of the products distribution and dispersal in the world, and even the visualization of other knowledge, such as poetries and songs scattered over many places in China. The process of products dispersal and the distribution of poetries and songs can be dynamically and visually displayed by pictures, audios, videos, multimedia, etc.

By using GIS in the development and utilization of Chinese ancient local chronicles, this paper explores a new way for the collation of ancient books and open up a new area for the research of digital humanities.

This is the first try about the application of GIS in the development and utilization of ancient local chronicles, and also the same of digital humanities research in the field of agricultural history.

With the rapid development of digital humanities, some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists. However, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment and practicable social network analysis tool to support humanists on interpreting texts and exploring characters’ social network relationships. Moreover, the advancement of digitization technologies for the retrieval and use of Chinese ancient books is arising an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. For these reasons, this paper aims to present a Chinese ancient books digital humanities research platform (CABDHRP) to support historical China studies. In addition to providing digital archives, digital reading, basic search and advanced search functions for Chinese ancient books, this platform still provides two novel functions that can more effectively support digital humanities research, including an automatic text annotation system (ATAS) for interpreting texts and a character social network relationship map tool (CSNRMT) for exploring characters’ social network relationships.

This study adopted DSpace, an open-source institutional repository system, to serve as a digital archives system for archiving scanned images, metadata, and full texts to develop the CABDHRP for supporting digital humanities (DH) research. Moreover, the ATAS developed in the CABDHRP used the Node.js framework to implement the system’s front- and back-end services, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by different databases, such as China Biographical Database (CBDB) and TGAZ, used to retrieve the useful linked data (LD) sources for interpreting ancient texts. Also, Neo4j which is an open-source graph database management system was used to implement the CSNRMT of the CABDHRP. Finally, JavaScript and jQuery were applied to develop a monitoring program embedded in the CABDHRP to record the use processes from humanists based on xAPI (experience API). To understand the research participants’ perception when interpreting the historical texts and characters’ social network relationships with the support of ATAS and CSNRMT, semi-structured interviews with 21 research participants were conducted.

An ATAS embedded in the reading interface of CABDHRP can collect resources from different databases through LD for automatically annotating ancient texts to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists to refer to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts, as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists to interpret ancient text through reading. Additionally, the CSNRMT provided by the CABDHRP can semi-automatically identify characters’ names based on Chinese word segmentation technology and humanists’ support to confirm and analyze characters’ social network relationships from Chinese ancient books based on visualizing characters’ social networks as a knowledge graph. The CABDHRP not only can stimulate humanists to explore new viewpoints in a humanistic research, but also can promote the public to emerge the learning interest and awareness of Chinese ancient books.

This study proposed a novel CABDHRP that provides the advanced features, including the automatic word segmentation of Chinese text, automatic Chinese text annotation, semi-automatic character social network analysis and user behavior analysis, that are different from other existed digital humanities platforms. Currently, there is no this kind of digital humanities platform developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review and historical context for digitization and interdisciplinary research involving digital surrogates of historical Persian manuscripts in the National Library and Archives of Iran and similarly engaged institutions.

The paper explores interdisciplinary aspects of Persian art, poetry, science, and philosophy, as revealed in the scrutiny of digitized manuscripts. It explores the enhancement of Persian, Iranian and Islamic cultural heritage research. It discusses benefits and concerns in conceptual contexts of library and information science literature. It references some manuscript digitization projects involving Islamic heritage, including the HARAM online manuscript service of the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI). It addresses issues of availability and access in global contexts.

Manuscript digitization, placed in the context of interdisciplinary research, reveals modern correlations to the interdisciplinary nature of ancient Persian arts and sciences — and to the purpose of digitization — as appropriate to an historical continuum of Persian written literacy and traditional Islamic cultural heritage.

For future contexts of digital global research, research involving many interrelated fields will benefit from use of digital manuscript surrogates. Institutional cooperation will be necessary. The physical conservation of fragile materials also benefits. Historical contexts should be observed, and preserved with the materials.

This paper shows that interdisciplinary research in international universities, libraries, museums, archives, government agencies, and other public institutions uniquely benefits from access to digitized manuscripts. It provides contexts for solving problems of physical manuscript decay and destruction.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation and exploitation of a historical corpus in an attempt to contribute to the preservation and availability of cultural heritage documents.

At first, the digitization process and attempts to the availability and awareness of the books and manuscripts in a historical library in Greece are presented. Then, processing and exploitation, taking into account natural language processing techniques of the digitized corpus, are discussed.

In the course of the project, methods that take into account the state of the documents and the particularities of the Greek language were developed.

In its present state, the use of the corpus facilitates the work of theologians, historians, philologists, paleographers, etc. and in the same time, prevents the original documents from further damage.

The results of this undertaking can give useful insights as for the creation of corpora of cultural heritage documents and as for the methods for the processing and exploitation of the digitized documents which take into account the language in which the documents are written.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the status of digitization of manuscripts in India and to give suggestions to transcribe these manuscripts easily, effortlessly and expeditiously.

The study is based on the analytical study of the literature available on global efforts in respect of documentation, preservation, conservation and digitization of manuscripts with special emphasis on the efforts of “namami” (acronym for National Manuscript Mission) for Indian manuscripts.

Meticulous analysis of literature and case studies give an overview of the diverse practices of public participation/crowd collaboration to transcribe and tagging of the rare and old historical documents around the globe. However, Indian libraries are far behind in adopting such practices.

India has a very rich cultural, educational and research heritage preserved in the form of manuscripts. These thousands of manuscripts are significant source of knowledge base for many researchers, however, despite their heritage value, these remain inaccessible to the researchers because of their being scattered and unpublished form. Moreover, even the digitized manuscripts remain difficult to use by the researchers because of immense linguistic diversity and scripts. Documentation and digitization of these manuscripts will not only preserve the invaluable heritage of India but also will enable their easy and vast access by the researchers globally. With the rapid growth in digital information and web-based technology, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) around the world encourage and engage public participation in various digitization projects to enrich and enhance their digital collections and place them on the web. However, Indian GLAM still refrains to accept and adopt such practices. Thus this paper will encourage and motivate the Indian GLAM to expedite their digitization and uploading them on web for tagging and transcribing.

This is an original paper and has great implementation value. During the study enormous literature was available on digitization of Indian manuscripts. However, not even a single study could be found on tagging and transcription of these manuscripts, specifically crowd contribution in this area. Hence, the paper, by presenting the evidences of crowd participation for the tagging and transcription of manuscripts globally, proposes the Indian GLAM to exploit the benefits of this practice for Indian manuscripts also in order to expedite the tagging process to enhance their usage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the task design and assignment of full-text generation on mass Chinese historical archives (CHAs) by crowdsourcing, with special attention paid to how to best divide full-text generation tasks into smaller ones assigned to crowdsourced volunteers and to improve the digitization of mass CHAs and the data-oriented processing of the digital humanities.

This paper starts from the complexities of character recognition of mass CHAs, takes Sheng Xuanhuai archives crowdsourcing project of Shanghai Library as a case study, and makes use of the theories of archival science, including diplomatics of Chinese archival documents, and the historical approach of Chinese archival traditions as the theoretical basis and analysis methods. The results are generated through the comprehensive research.

This paper points out that volunteer tasks of full-text generation include transcription, punctuation, proofreading, metadata description, segmentation, and attribute annotation in digital humanities and provides a metadata element set for volunteers to use in creating or revising metadata descriptions and also provides an attribute tag set. The two sets can be used across the humanities to construct overall observations about texts and the archives of which they are a part. Along these lines, this paper presents significant insights for application in outlining the principles, methods, activities, and procedures of crowdsourced full-text generation for mass CHAs.

This study is the first to explore and identify the effective design and allocation of tasks for crowdsourced volunteers completing full-text generation on CHAs in digital humanities.

The purpose of this paper is to review the current status of collaboration in cultural heritage preservation in East Asia, including digital projects, and to suggest practical improvements based on a cultural structuralism perspective.

Through exploratory research, the paper addresses aspects for successful collaboration in cultural heritage digitisation in East Asia.

The paper indicates the difference in collaboration of cultural heritage digitisation between regions such as Europe and the unique situation in East Asia.

If collaboration between the countries of East Asia was implemented then such a community could deal with the issues of cultural heritage by having a standard scheme or policy.

There has been little literature published on East Asian cultural heritage initiatives, particularly in the area of digitisation and digital preservation.

The People's Collection Wales aims to collect, interpret, distribute and discuss Wales' cultural heritage in an online environment. Individual users or local history societies are able to create their own digital collections, contribute relevant content, as well as access digital resources from heritage institutions. This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of the People's Collection Wales, which is being funded through CyMAL: Museums, Archives and Libraries Wales.

Work on digitising various collections in Welsh cultural heritage institutions, such as Culturenet Cymru, the National Library of Wales, the National Museum Wales, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales has been in progress since the 1990s. An overview of this work is given, along with details of how the People's Collection Wales project has developed between 2009 and 2011.

Material available from the People's Collection Wales is available in a variety of media, including: film; images; video and audio clips; maps; photographs; and text. The web site also uses global positioning system technology to allow users to travel over the landscape of Wales, and view artefacts in three dimensions.

People's Collection Wales is an example of a service resulting from a convergence of libraries, archives and museums, and which showcases user involvement in the creation of digital content. A number of innovative applications, including mobile technologies, are being implemented within the project.