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While writing up my thesis on China's pre-war monetary history over the past couple of years, I have had the privilege to work in Canberra
with Renata Osborne and Toshio Takagi, who tended to my interminable enquiries about new books and primary source acquisitions. Across the lake,
Wan Wong and Mayumi Shinozaki were equally accommodating, often referring me to new publications in my field about which I had very little knowledge
Throughout this period, my research required that I skim through large volumes of late-Qing and Republican era press reports capturing popular
sentiments and perceptions of foreign banks. It was this aspect of my work that taught me to value the electronic databases available from The
Australia National Library (ANU) and the National Library of Australia (NLA). The present paper will establish some broader generalisations based
on my experiences, so that other postgraduate students, librarians and Australia's wider Sinophone community might also benefit from these
resources.
The first part of the paper will discuss how and what electronic research tools might be revolutionising the landscape of historiography in
the years to come. The second section will specifically focus on Sinological applications, and the ways in which they differ from European-language
platforms. The third section will identify some of the shortfalls of the main electronic databases that cater for scholars here in Australia, and
pinpoint those databases that have not yet been introduced. Finally, I will try to assess the next strain of applications that may appear on the
horizon in the near future, and make suggestions to colleagues concerning areas where I think much headway can potentially be made with relatively
little effort.
1. Using Electronic Databases
Probably just about anyone who completed their undergraduate studies before the 1990s can recall what a Sisyphean task it used to be to identify relevant articles in tatty printed indexes for an essay long overdue, then handwrite a hasty draft and have others type it for you. Sometime in the early 1990s, the tedium of typewriters had decisively made way for the PC. Word-processing technology, and the subsequent spread of the World Wide Web rendered some of these labor-intensive research chores a fleeting memory. Nowadays, electronic databases help scholars economise on valuable research time and streamline fieldwork exigencies in two salient ways. Primarily, researchers can now dig out statistical, semantic or biographical bits of information in just a fraction of the time it once took experienced scholars to look through their diffuse notes. Speedier knowledge management is made possible by the increasingly large number of mainstream reference aids that have become available online: dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, yearbooks, etc. One such aid, which I have personally benefited from immensely, is the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of British National Biography [ODBNB] - a recent acquisition by the ANU featuring a collection of more than 50,000 biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past. Scholars whose interests interface, in one way or another, with British history would find this application indispensable. Sinologists, too, can benefit, since the ODBNB affords a vantage point from which one can learn a lot more on the formative background of Shanghai's "Old China Hands" - be they Empire Builders, Merchants, Bankers or Soldiers-turned-Mercenaries. The ODBNB was exceedingly costly to produce, and is strictly limited to paying subscribers. Yet, it can become a doubly powerful research tool when supplemented with open-code applications that are currently changing the face of the Net. Wikipedia is probably the best example: a unique free-content online encyclopaedia that is written collaboratively by anonymous volunteers in a host of languages. Launched as recently as 2001, it has now accumulated more than 1.5 million entries, with about one third in English and no less than 100,000 in Japanese. The other radical transformation of our research routine is propelled by what can loosely be termed as the virtual library. Once upon a time, a new research project behooved months of wandering in pursuit of pertinent materials. Nowadays, however, the perimeters of received wisdom are much more clearly demarked by virtue of the 'keyword search'. In other words, it is now infinitely easier to identify and bag nearly everything of value that has been written in one's field. This development is largely attributable to improvements in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, which allow academic networks like JSTOR to catalog and digitize issues of leading journals across different disciplines as they appear. This results not just in a remarkable upturn in productivity, but it is also more environmentally-friendly as more and more researchers get accustomed to reading material on a computer screen and to printing off segments more selectively. At the same time, libraries can conserve precious stack space by offering serials electronically rather than leaving them to gather dust in hardbound volumes. ANU postgraduate students, who have had to pay a visit to the Hancock Library basement in search of old journal articles on tightly-packed shelves, know that this can often be a vexing task. JSTOR was established in order to relieve readers and librarians around the world from similar tasks. It was set up in August 1995 as an independent non-profit organization, and has since inspired other ambitious projects. PCI Full Text, for example, is a database comprising back issues of over 300 leading journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It provides location leads, and sometimes online access, to over 1.2 million articles, the earliest of which dating as far back as 1770. But above all, our research routine is liable to change in the near future due to the fact that more and more archives in the West and Japan have begun to put up their entire catalogues online, allowing scholars to carry out vital work off-site. This trend seems to have been pioneered last year by the UK Public Records Office in London, and appears to be catching on rapidly. The PRO has also set an example for other archives around the world by committing itself to complete digitisation of all its collections within the next few years. This means that, before long, scholars will not have to travel all the way to London to view declassified British government files. One can certainly envision PhD dissertations touching on themes in British history being submitted here in Australia in the near future without the need for expensive fieldwork to be undertaken in the UK. Probably the most reassuring sign that this trend is truly spreading is the fact that the US National Archives and Record Administration [NARA] has recently launched a substantial segment of its catalogue online, complete with call numbers and content abstracts. Other archives in Europe and East Asia may still be lagging behind the Anglo-American lead in this area, but it's only a question of time before they rethink their role. 2. Sinological Database For 'Asianists' working in the West, one particular electronic database towers above all the rest - The Bibliography of Asian Studies [BAS]. It contains information on more than 610,000 articles and monographs concerning East, Southeast, and South Asia, published worldwide from 1971 to the present. BAS has identified the most important English-language periodicals in Asian Studies, and has indexed them on a priority basis in order to make their coverage as up-to-date as possible. Various ad-hoc projects have also contributed substantial numbers of additional records to the database, thereby increasing the coverage to include newly-published and previously-excluded journals as well as eliminating gaps in the coverage of previously indexed periodicals. Its main shortcoming is that the Bibliography is largely oblivious to literature published in other languages, particularly Asian ones. Thus, scholars have to rely on a melange of country-specific databases to keep abreast of academic discourse outside the confines of Anglophone world. Solutions here vary in server reliability and scope across disciplines. The Nichigai Network, for example, catalogues 1.68 million bibliographical records of Japanese publications from 1925 onwards - but, sadly, only a small part of these materials is physically available in Canberra. It would be encouraging to see Nichigai raising the bar by offering some of the journal articles on its online catalogue for download along the lines set out by JSTOR and other Western academic databases. China specialists, for their part, have to make do with Zhongguo qikan quanwen shujuku [ZGQKQWSJK] which is maintained by a Beijing-based company that is run by Tsinghua University graduates. Though touted as all-embracing, I personally find this database of relatively little use. It does allow users to download articles, but they are of uneven quality. Search matches almost invariably yield short items published in backwood PRC journals, often comprising inordinate footnotes or none at all. Questionable quality-control practices are compounded by the fact that the database leaves out pre-1994 literature, which means scholars have to do more footwork in search of printed indexes. The Renmin daxue baokan ziliao [RMDXBKZL] is one possible supplement that comes to mind. Considered more selective in its choice of articles, the RMDXBKZL is nevertheless unavailable online. On the whole, Taiwan-based projects seem to pack more punch. The online gateway to the Siku quanshu is, for example, a wonderful tool for the study of Chinese cultural history, converting this gigantic Qianlong-era repository into electronically searchable files. One would hope that similar Academia Sinica or commercial applications would become readily available in Australia. These now range from e-texts of classics like Hong lou meng, Shuihu zhuan, Xi youji, to online editions of the Twenty-Five Dynastic Histories, the Tripatika and divination bone facsimile. Ultimately, advancement in primary source availability holds the future. In this sense, the Japan Centre for Asian Historical Records [JACAR] has also picked up the PRO gauntlet. The Center is now employing cutting-edge computer technology to enable scholars to download - at no charge - select Meiji and Taisho government records on Japan's foreign policy with English transcripts. When extended to cover all National Archive of Japan collections - the JACAR project promises to be an incredibly powerful research aid. 3. Suggestions for the Future… Because it is so unique in the region, the JACAR project underscores what is left wanting in other East Asian databases. The PRC, so it seems, is teeming with state, provincial and municipal level Library danweis entrusted with the preservation, compilation, and dissemination of historical documents, but accessibility remains a persistent problem. Whereas scholars can now search the Jinshisuo and Guoshiguan Republican-era catalogue without having to board a Taipei-bound flight, the top two historic archives in the PRC did not even have, until recently, a website of their own. In both cases, however, off-site perusal of records seems a very long way off. It is precisely here where tighter cooperation with universities and libraries in the West may provide the funds needed to free up a looming bottleneck. It would be ideal if scholars could streamline fieldwork in China by achieving a better idea of what is available in their archives before departure. Money, of course, is a perpetual problem in other areas too. Its premium content and impressive interface notwithstanding, we have recently had to forfeit the Super Star [Chao Xing] database here in Canberra because subscription was too expensive. I personally feel that this episode illustrates not only homespun economics, but also the fact that many China scholars - PhD students and Professors alike - do not sufficiently appreciate how an electronic research capacity can conserve time and energy. IT-driven innovations may be a bit harder to stomach in the Humanities, so it would have been good to see the Menzies Library at the ANU or the NLA appointing a librarian specifically dedicated to expounding upon their merits. Given the current pace of change, regular 'e-training' for postgraduate students may be as important as keeping tabs on new electronic research aids that come on stream. 1For more information on the research aids mentioned in this paper or how to access them - please contact the author by email. Many thanks to Timothy Amos, a fellow PhD Scholar at the Division of Pacific and Asian Studies, who read and commented on an earlier draft. |