A New Look for an Old Archive: The CD-ROM Searching System for the Grand Council Reference Collection at the Taipei Palace Museum

In a 1979 article, Beatrice Bartlett called the chronological, author, and subject indexes to the Palace Memorial collection at Taipei's Palace Museum "an immense boon to the researcher, providing an entrance to what would otherwise be an impenetrable mass of documents." ² With the recent introduction of its new CD-ROM Searching System for the Grand Council Reference Collection (Gugong guangdie chaxun xitong junji dang), the Museum provides researchers with an even greater boon—the prospect of prompt, online access to the 189,906 items in this collection. This brief article will introduce the new system and illustrate how it expedites research in the Grand Council collection, based on the results of online searches during the summer of 2000.

The Grand Council Collection, sometimes called the "Grand Council Reference Collection" (junji chu lufu zouzhe or junji dang), consists chiefly of Grand Council copies (lufu) of Palace Memorials. In Qing times, it was organized in monthly and later half-monthly packets (bao), which were filed chronologically. In addition, some packets dealt with specialized topics (zhuan an bao), such as military campaigns, and often match the specialized record books (zhuan an dang) created by the Grand Council. Although Chinese-language palace memorials date from the Kangxi reign, reference copies were made only beginning in the Yongzheng period. The Taipei Palace Museum holdings of Grand Council reference copies begin only in Qianlong 12 (1748) ³ . Prospective users should note that while the Museum has published a great many of its original palace memorials for the Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong, and Guangxu reigns, most of the Grand Council copies remain unpublished and accessible only at the Museum. It should be noted further that the online system indexes only items in the Grand Council Collection, and not the Palace Memorial originals or other documents in the Museum's collection.

The system was conceived as a compromise between preservation and accessibility. The Museum was reluctant to limit researchers' use of the Grand Council collection, but the documents, originally scrawled on poor-quality paper, were rapidly deteriorating due to frequent handling and electronic reproduction. Microfilming offered only a temporary solution, as neither the films nor the machines required to read them proved durable. The Library finally decided that the ideal solution lay in an online collection comprising an index based on the card indexes to the Grand Council holdings and digital photographs of the Grand Council copies. ⁴ As of this writing, the system is still a work in progress, available only on a single computer in the Museum Library. In August 2000, some 80,000 items were available on that computer; by the following summer, an additional 40,000 had come online. ⁵ According to Ms. Fung Ming-chu, the Library intends to have a completed version on the Internet by 2004. Ms. Fung also noted that the Library has not yet decided whether to sell CD-ROMs of the database, or make it available by subscription to institutional and individual users.

The online system functions as a new and much-improved version of the old card files. As Bartlett explains in her 1979 article, items in the Grand Council collection are filed chronologically and indexed with a matching set of chronologically filed index cards. These cards contain a great deal of useful information, including the date, the memorialist and his official position, a summary of the contents, a copy of the imperial rescript, and an indication of the existence of enclosures (fu), such as maps (tu) and lists (qingdan). ⁶ A researcher using the Grand Council collection typically consults these cards to locate the most important memorials, and then request photocopies of the documents from the Library's Rare Books and Archives Collection. ⁷ Using the card file...