Modern History Databases

Since 1997, the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica has been engaged in the digitization of canonical texts, historical materials, and archives, hoping to promote research resources and education on modern history through the combination of digitization and the Internet.

The Archives has been digitizing the records of the Foreign Affairs and Economic Affairs departments for many years, and has established the Archives Collection Search System. In 2023, the Archives rebuilt the new collection system. It is now divided into five categories: Foreign Affairs, Economic Affairs, Personal Information, Organizations, and Maps, with more than 500,000 metadata records available for cataloging and image reviewing.

The Hu Shih Memorial Hall has promoted to establish the database of Hu Shih Archives Search System , converting archives in different media into digital files for easier researchers to access the collection and establishing the database management system to facilitate scholarly research and use.

Since 2005, Kuo Ting-yee Library has promoted the digitization of its collections, and in 2021, the library established a new version of the digital collection system, which will include newspapers, bulletin, periodicals, books, and archival documents.

In addition, the MHDB team of the institute are gradually building various topics databases, such as English-Chinese Dictionary database, the Modern Annals TIS system, the Integrated Information System on Modern and Contemporary Characters database, and Modern History Geographical Information Services. There are interrelated query functions between these databases, the institute hopes to construct an overall historical database group with the themes of people, events, time, places, and things.

In 2014, we combined the digital scholarly resources of the Institute—the Library, the Archives, the Hu Shih Memorial Hall, the MHDB team established various Databases, and have interlibrary cooperation projects with different libraries to form the Modern History Databases (MHDB), which provides users with clear access to individual databases and instructions on how to use them, and strength the cross-database searching function to become a platform for integrating digital research resources in modern history.

(From the original website.)