Chinese Digital Archive 1966-1976

Full description

This electronic resource contains unique and in some cases rare and fragile material held at the Australian National University relating to the Chinese Cultural Revolution period (1966 to 1976). The collection contains over 1000 pages of material and is constantly being expanded. Items include speeches from leaders, notes of meetings from the period, photos and political cartoons.

The project was established in conjunction with the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance (PRDLA) http://www.prdla.org to develop an electronic gateway via the Internet to make these resources available both nationally and internationally. This web-based database not only makes this material accessible globally to the academic community but will preserve the contents of some very fragile and rare material.

The material selected for inclusion in this database have been in the first instance from the Cultural Revolution period. However, additional materials from outside this time-frame which are relevant to the events of the Cultural Revolution are also being included.

Although most of the material is held in the Australian National University Library, some material is held in private collections by academic staff at the ANU, who have been willing to have their materials included in the database.

As part of its on-going commitment to this project, the Library is working towards seeking additional international contributing partners who also hold relevant material on the Cultural Revolution period.

The full list of documents can be browsed, or individual documents can be retrieved through a search on title, subject or description. Library of Congress Pinyin romanisation standards have been followed. Subject terms are in English and follow Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Images have been produced from both original material and microfilm of the period and are provided in JPEG and PDF format. The metadata is entered in Pinyin and English using Unicode UTF-8 encoding.

Notes

Various formats.

Significance statement

This collection contains over 1000 pages of material related to China's Cultural Revolution period (1966-76) and is constantly being updated. It not only makes this material accessible globally to the academic community but will preserve the contents of some very fragile, rare and historically important documents.