Curating the Chinese ancient book catalogs: Leveraging the dual roles of humanities scholars as experts and users in collaborative practice

Abstract

Chinese ancient book catalogs are important cultural heritage and academic resources for the study of ancient Chinese history and culture. These catalogs need to be curated so that their value can be fully exploited in today's digital environment. This study is based on a collaborative curation project where eight representative ancient catalogs were curated into a diachronic dataset and tools to discover and analyze the data were developed. We reviewed literature and consulted humanities scholars to derive the characteristics and curation requirements of the ancient catalogs. A collaborative model was proposed based on the requirements to guide the curation process. This model reveals the duality of humanities scholars' role in collaborative curation and depicts main curation activities including metadata and description, appraisal and selection, data processing, developing tools, access and use, and evolution. Lessons learned from the curation practice include two main issues—project personnel and humanities scholars' acceptance of visualization. The study also yields a dataset and a set of tools that can be directly used by scholars interested in knowledge organization and ancient catalog related topics.