Networking the Sources of Chinese Audiovisual Documents: The Challenges to compose the Metadata

Since the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Audiovisual Documents were digitized in the Chinese speaking region. Converting the information into a digital format allowed us to make a virtual environment that is easier to preserve, access, and share our cultural heritage. However, as many libraries and archives are rushing into digital projects, we are also facing many new challenges: such as budgets that are being strained by digitization, and worrying that we may have overlooked the preservation of some of our original documents in the process. How do we make a long term plan to preserve the new digital information and to compose metadata that is complete enough for further research? How can musicology play a role in today’s music archiving works? We must not only preserve materials digitally but also start to curate them.
 
Digital Archive Center for Music at National Taiwan Normal University was founded in 2004. During a decade, the center completed nearly 30 digital archive projects and digitized over 200,000 items of precious music legacy related to Taiwan. In 2011, the center together with Shanghai Conservatory of Music Library proposed the “Chinese Music Collecting Program” (華人音樂文獻集藏) and the “Conference on Cooperative Development and Sharing of Chinese Resources” (中文文獻資源共建共享合作計畫) as an collaborative initiative for creating and sharing resources. This paper will be based on these experiences and using two audiovisual projects as discussion examples.