53 New Books in the Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

The Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library) is a leading library in the field of Asian studies. Its collection amounts to 880,000 books of historical importance, and an especially interesting collection in the Toyo Bunko is "Morrison Library," which consists of 24,000 books about China and Asia written in several European languages. Regarding its relevance, scale and coverage, we decided to start our digital archive project from the Morrison Library, and initiated the digitization of precious books in 2002.

We are in the pursuit of two research directions. The first direction concerns the application of optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation and image processing for the automatic analysis of digitized documents. Our motivation behind this direction is the need for the management of large number of books; that is, we put more emphasis on speed in the speed and precision tradeoff in order to increase the number of books in the digital archive. Although the current OCR technology is imperfect, even imperfect results can support useful search. The second direction is the collaborative annotation environment for digital cultural resources. We begin with closed annotation by domain experts, but in the future we aim at establishing a mechanism for soliciting collective annotation in a collaborative environment.

User interface on the Toyo Bunko Portal is designed so that it suggests as many navigational links as possible to increase for a user the opportunity of browsing deep into the archive. We provide other mechanisms for defining various contexts in which digital archives are to be viewed using our proposed database engine. Finally, this project is within a framework of Digital Silk Road Project.

We added 53 new books to become the collection of 203 books, 59,358 pages.

1. Im fernen Osten : vol.1
2. Atlas zur Reiseroute in Ost-Asien : vol.1
3. Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale : vol.1
4. Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale : vol.2
5. Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale : vol.3
6. Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale : vol.4
7. Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale : vol.5
8. Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein dans les sables du Turkestan Oriental : vol.1
9. Documents sur les Tou-kiue (Turcs) occidentaux : vol.1
10. Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine : vol.1
11. Les documents chinois de la troisième expédition de Sir Aurel Stein en Asie Centrale : vol.1
12. Wall Paintings from Ancient Shrines in Central Asia : vol.1
13. Wall Paintings from Ancient Shrines in Central Asia : vol.2
14. China : vol.1
15. China : vol.2
16. China : vol.3
17. China : vol.4
18. China : vol.5
19. Atlas von China : vol.1
20. Atlas von China : vol.2
21. Die Geographische-Wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse meiner Reisen in Zentralasien, 1894-1897 : vol.1
22. Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899-1902 : vol.3
23. Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899-1902 : vol.4
24. Southern Tibet : vol.1
25. Southern Tibet : vol.2
26. Southern Tibet : vol.3
27. Southern Tibet : vol.4
28. Southern Tibet : vol.5
29. Southern Tibet : vol.6
30. Southern Tibet : vol.7
31. Southern Tibet : vol.8
32. Southern Tibet : vol.9
33. Southern Tibet : vol.10
34. Southern Tibet : vol.11
35. Southern Tibet : vol.12
36. Meine Tibetreise : vol.1
37. Meine Tibetreise : vol.2
38. Reise in China und Tibet, 1905-1908 : vol.1
39. Antiquities of Indian Tibet : vol.1
40. Antiquities of Indian Tibet : vol.2
41. 羽田博士史学論文集 : vol.1
42. 羽田博士史学論文集 : vol.2
43. Documente de l'Époque Mongole des XIIIe et XIVe Siècle : vol.1
44. The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1
45. The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2
46. Ser Marco Polo : vol.1
47. Marco Polo : vol.1
48. Marco Polo : vol.2
49. 圓明園東長春宮西洋樓圖 : vol.1
50. India : vol.1
51. Indische Palaste und Wohnhauser : vol.1
52. Nouvelles recherches archéologiques à Bāmiyān : vol.1
53. Shotorak : vol.1