Author's title |
Executive Officer, Special Collections Department, National Taiwan University Library/ Doctorial Student, Library and Information Science Department, National Taiwan University; M. A. Program Student, Department of History, National Taiwan Normal University |
Abstract |
This research was conducted by using the database established under the Digital Archives Project on Taiwan Historical Collections of National Taiwan University. The authors took a special case "Forbidden of Suicide in Fraud of Others" which appeared in both the Taiwan University's rubbings collection and the Tan-Hsin Archive as an example, and demonstrated how cross-referencing use of these two collections could help to uncover some historical problems of the Taiwan society and the solutions from the government. The monumental stone rubbings, mostly single autonomous items, depict various aspects such as politics, social development, religion, customs and culture of the early Taiwan society. The Tan-Hsin Archive, on the other hand, is significant in having series of documents concerning a single event happened in the old Taiwan society. As these two collections have similar spatial and geographic coverage, the Tan-Hsin Archive could serve as supplements to the rubbings for doing research on the subjects described in the relic rubbings. However, the rubbings are mostly over-sized documents and not easy to provide for use. The Tan-Hsin Archive contains a tremendous amount of documents, therefore, it is difficult to retrieve documents concerning a definite topic by using microfilms or duplicates of the originals. Now that database of these two collections is available, it is possible to easily retrieve documents concerning the same event from these two collections. As a result, it enables cross-referencing use of these first-hand historical resources. The paper hopes to initiate new research possibilities based on the rubbings and encourage in-dept research from referencing use of Tan-Hsin Archive. In addition, the authors made an approximately corresponding topical map of these two collections from subject analysis, adding it as an appendix of this article for researchers' reference.
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