Modern Women Journals Database

The “Women and Gender History Research Group” of the Modern History Institute collects books and journals from libraries worldwide, founding the basis of women and gender studies in our institute. For preserving these data and using them efficiently, our institute has begun to scan and digitalize these data and categorize the metadata. So far, including 213 kinds of journals and 110,000 pieces of data has been constructed and opened for public use in 2015.

When this database is completed, it will create new possibility for modern history of Chinese women, commerce, and journal. This database would not only broaden the scope of journal research, but also facilitate multiple research dimensions, including advertisements, images and publication trends etc., especially breakthroughs in quantity research in journals. Moreover, bridging the connections between data is one of important functions of database. By searching and quantify publication data in database, one can map out the whole picture of the publishing industry in the Republic of China (especially journal publishing) and find out publishing dates, places, editions, prices and some relations between different journals etc.. These information would help understand the functions of “print capitalism” of the Republic of China and what role gender played in the mechanism.

Within the database function, except basic bibliography searching and original book’s images comparing with texts, the searching method of integrating “Modern Women Journal” and the MHDB (Academia Sinica) system is: 1. Connect the “Integrated Information System on Modern and Contemporary Characters” from the author bar, so as to grasp the related information of the author. 2. Connect the “Modern Annals TIS System” and “The Library Newspaper and Periodical Data Retrieval System”, using the historical outline of “TIS system” to establish contemporary background data, so as to observe journal information from multi-facets. Moreover, because “Modern Women Journal” contains many kinds of journals and their incipient publishing time varies, the database design includes a special function for quickly searching by publishing period. Users can use timeline to examine released publications within a certain period, and can also change to “detail browse” to read the catalogues details respectively.

(From the original website.)