National Central Library & KADOC at KU Leuven Sign Agreement of Cooperation on the Joint Catalog of Rare Chinese Books Database
The Education Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the EU and Belgium hosted an online ceremony on December 18, 2024 for the signing of copies of an agreement between Taiwan’s National Central Library (NCL) and KADOC at KU Leuven in Belgium to share access to their respective catalogs of ancient book resources. KADOC is the Interfaculty Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society at the university. It describes itself as “an international centre for the study of the interaction between religion, culture and society in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
The agreement stems from the efforts of Dr. Roy Chun Lee 李淳, Taiwan’s Representative in the EU and Belgium, and Dr. Nicole Yen-Yi Lee, Director of the Education Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the EU and Belgium. They visited KADOC on May 6, 2023 and were welcomed by Prof. Bart Raymaekers, president of KADOC's Scientific Committee. KADOC’s director Kim Christiaens and archive assistant Benoit Desmaricaux talked with them about KADOC’s history and work and the historical religious connections between Taiwan and Belgium. They showed their visitors historical artifacts related to Lu ZhengXiang 陸徵祥, the first Foreign Minister of the Republic of China and expressed hopes for future cooperation with Taiwan on the preservation of historical artifacts and academic research.
Following this initial meeting, the Education Division organized an online meeting between KADOC and the NCL, held on June 12, 2023 and the two parties agreed to collaborate on sharing access to ancient book resources. KADOC would provide bibliographic data of its Chinese ancient book collection to the NCL to be included in the library’s publicly accessible Joint Catalog of Rare Chinese Books database, and the NCL would give KADOC access to the database’s online image printing function within a designated IP domain. The Education Division Director Dr. Nicole Yen-Yi Lee, hosted the online ceremony on December 18, 2024 during which each of the parties signed copies of an agreement of cooperation to exchange.
Representative Lee congratulated the parties for beginning this formal cooperation, saying that Taiwan and Belgium have many similarities and he looks forward to seeing the two parties have more opportunities for exchanges and visits. Prof. Bart Raymaekers then spoke, saying that KADOC is one of Belgium’s leading cultural heritage institutions. It preserves a vast collection of Belgian archival data and historical documents, including significant holdings of Chinese historical materials, and this agreement will open up more exchanges with the NCL. He agreed that Taiwan and Belgium have many similarities and this offers more avenues for cooperation to explore. Prof. Wang Han-Ching 王涵青, Director-General of the National Central Library, said in her remarks that the database of the Joint Catalog of Chinese Rare Books currently has similar agreements with 94 institutions, and that this collaboration with KADOC is another important milestone in the sharing of resources and the protecting of cultural knowledge.
The NCL established this database in 2000 to strengthen international collaboration and promote the joint sharing of rare book resources. Researchers can use this database to learn about the distribution of ancient Chinese texts around the world; they can also use it to interpret database materials, and compare and analyze different versions of the same ancient texts to give them a more thorough grasp of research materials. The KADOC-KU Leuven archives include a large collection of ancient texts, documents, academic works, and religious classics from around the world. The materials in this collection are of great importance for historical and cultural research, as well as academic for workshops, research projects, and other activities.
KADOC and the National Central Library look forward to more substantial exchanges which will benefit researchers and scholars all around the world.