On Building a Full-Text Digital Library of Historical Documents

The National Taiwan University Library has built a digital library of historical documents about Taiwan. The content is unique in that it covers about 80% of all primary Chinese historical materials about Taiwan before 1895, and that they are all available in searchable full text, in addition to metadata. To make these materials more accessible to the research community, we have developed, in addition to full-text search and retrieval, a concept of regarding the set of documents retrieved by a query as a sub-collection, and have designed post-query classification methods to help users find the inter-relationships among documents and the collective meaning of a sub-collection. We have also developed techniques for term extraction for old Chinese and a data format for representing governmental structures. We hope that our system will help advance research in Taiwanese history, and will set a model for other similar endeavor.