The NTU Research Center for Digital Humanities and Academia Historica announced the formal opening to the public of the Academia Historica Digital Archives Search System (available in Mandarin at http://ahdas.drnh.gov.tw/) on March 8. Besides creating the opportunity for collaboration between the two parties, the new system makes it more convenient to use Academia Historica’s abundant digitized material for teaching and research.

The system utilizes a post-query classification system developed by the Research Center for Digital Humanities. Digitized materials that were fully prepared by Academia Historica as far back as 2002, but were scattered across different databases, have been made available through the new system. The system comprises a massive amount of materials, including over 400,000 items of cataloged materials and more than five million digitized files. These materials cover presidential and vice-presidential historical artifacts as well as general historical files concerning the Republic of China.

Since its establishment, the center has worked to develop systems and tools that meet the needs of its users to advance digital research within the humanities. Due to the accumulation of an enormous volume of digitalized materials over the years, a query on the old search system could only generate the total number of items, leaving users to search by browsing each item individually. While continuing to provide searches of key words and categories, this new system achieves greater speed, accuracy and convenience by also permitting searches based on level, historical period, topics, person names and place names.