Breathing New Life into Static Materials

Many libraries have large quantities of books that are rarely used. A practice that is becoming increasingly popular is to put them in remote repositories, which often only expedites their pace into oblivion. We call such collections static materials because of their extremely low usage rate. In this paper we propose a method which, through digitization, gives them a new life. Our approach starts with identifying a feasible objective that could make a ´collection´ emerge from certain static materials, then systematically extract and digitize objects of the selected theme from those materials. The resulting collection from such a practice may be unique, significant, and useful. We demonstrate this idea by describing a digital library of old photographs of Taiwan, extracted almost exclusively from existing pre-1945 Japanese books held in the National Taiwan University Library. This collection, numbered at 39,743, covers a wide spectrum of topics, and fills a visual documentary void in Taiwanese history. This digital library can be accessed at http://photo.lib.ntu.edu.tw/pic/db/oldphoto.jsp.