Harvard, National Library of China Embark on Digitization Project

Excerpt: "[T]he project will digitize Harvard-Yenching Library’s entire 51,500-volume Chinese rare book collection. One of the libraries which make up the Harvard College Library system, Harvard-Yenching is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world....“Scholars come from all over the world to use our rare book collection because many of these titles are not available anywhere else,” said [Harvard-Yenching Librarian James Cheng]. “I think this project will be a huge contribution to scholarship by making these materials available to a much broader audience. We need to change the mindset that rare materials must be kept behind closed doors. A library is not a museum. We need to begin making these materials available to scholars, and the best way to do that is through digitization.” "