Seminar on Union Catalog for Ancient Chinese Books

Representatives from libraries in the Greater China region and the U.S. met together at the NCL from April 19 to 20 for a seminar on the cooperative development of a union catalog database for ancient Chinese books. The seminar was sponsored by the NCL and the Council for Cultural Affairs, Executive Yuan. Discussions focused on methods and standards for compiling the catalog resources of libraries with important collections of ancient Chinese books and making these resources available through a joint database. In Taiwan alone, such institutions have already compiled a union catalog of more than 120,000 entries. One of the aims of the seminar was to augment these resources through cooperation with the Harvard-Yenching Library in the U.S., Fung Ping Shan Library at the University of Hong Kong, Biblioteca Central de Macau and other leading libraries in the U.S. and mainland China.