Library of Congress Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection now available!

Cultural historians , ethnologists, philologists, and all interested audiences will want to know about a trove of historical research materials on China that is now available  from the Library of Congress. The Chinese Rare Books presentation is now available at https://www.loc.gov/collections/chinese-rare-books/about-this-collection/ .  This project has been underway for many years, and the initial release makes available more than a thousand titles comprised of more than five hundred thousand images.  LC digitized these in collaboration with the National Central Library of Taiwan, recognizing the collection as the most valuable Chinese classical resource. It encompasses a wide array of disciplines and subjects:  Chinese ancient classics, manuscripts, Buddhist sutras, hand-painted pictures, local gazetteers and ancient maps. In addition to the rich content, it introduces a new interface for navigating to multi-part objects via a drop-down menu on the search results page (https://www.loc.gov/collections/chinese-rare-books/ ), and enables navigation between an item’s different resources from the single-page view (e.g.https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcnclscd.unk85040106.1A000/?sp=1 ).