謝清俊

Abstract

On January 1^st 2002, a national project called the “National Digital Archives program (NDAP)” has been launched in Taiwan. The first phase of this program was planned as a 5-years program, from 2002 to 2006. In this paper, the ideas, visions and justifications of this program we will be presented with illustrative examples.

In fact, before the program was launched, years had been spent in studying the impacts of Information Technology (IT) on social and cultural changes. The subjects studied include the following major topics: the properties of digital media, the rules of media on communication and knowledge processing, the nature of information, a definition of information that serves our purposes, characteristics of IT, the rules of IT on academic research, education and learning, etc. These studies are trying to address some much-concerned problems such as: How does information technology interacts with our culture and society? What are the cultural and social impacts and ways of impact of Information Technology? Can our culture survive in the information age? Will our traditions become endangered while Internet becomes more popular? And, one of the actions responses to the question “If so, what shall we do?” is the launching of NDAP. These studies make the national program possible. The highlights of these studies will be summarized in this paper as some background for understanding our program.

In 1998, our National Science Council (NSC) started some probing projects to studies the feasibility of digitizing national cultural holdings. The first project thus arranged is the “Digital Museum Project” and then followed by some others. These projects, dozens of universities and research organizations participated in, become ancestors of NDAP. Besides, for the time being, 9 major content holders in Taiwan have also been involved. The total budget in 2002 is about $11millian USD ($38M NTD) and estimated annul growth rate will be around 20% or even higher in 2002~2006.

The output of NDAP has a centralized database called “the Taiwan Digital Archives (TDA)”. The ancestors of NDAP had already contributed some digitized archives into the TDA. To name a few, such as: language corpus for various times and places in history, historical maps of China and Taiwan, collections of indigenous cultures in Taiwan, some contemporary historical archives of China and Taiwan (1860-1970), some nature resources of Taiwan (including all species of fishes, shell fishes and plants, partial species of insects, butterflies and birds, and some minerals), some archaeological collections and fossil collections, some collections of bronze and stone rubbings, museum collections of jade, porcelain, bronze, ancient calligraphy and painting, images of rare books, selected gazetteer documents, and some early periodic and newspapers published in Taiwan.

All the digital archives of TDA will be placed in a three interwoven coordinates, namely, time, space and language (TSL). We called “coordinates” just because they provide general references for addressing as well as rooms for placing all archives. Besides providing various corpuses, the language coordinate includes linguistic ontology, markups (phonetic, syntactic and semantic) and multi-lingual mapping facilities. These TSL coordinates and relevant technical conventions, standards and specifications are the most important factors that make unite various digital products into TDA possible.

The applications of TDA are up to our imagination. In 2002, we will focus the application of TDA into two major domains, education and industries. NDAP will cooperate and/or collaborate with Ministry of Education and Ministry of Economics to promote the utilization of TDA in various levels of education and to stimulate cultural, value-added and information-related industries, respectively. We think, digital archives themselves will be a new form of material and the content of digital archives will be serving as a new kind of “energy” to bootstrap both education and industries. Also, we hope we can provide a free public cultural information system to our citizens by the end of 2002.

NDAP has already established some international relations and co-operations with some foreign organizations. TDA will be a technical compatible international database and we are looking forward to cooperating/collaborating with any project that cares cultural heritage and digitize them as sharable precious resources for all mankind.