• 2014-10-23

This year’s Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) annual meeting and joint meeting was held on October 21-23 at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. The theme of the meeting was “Museum Computing: An Approach to Bridging Cultures, Communities and Sciences.” More than 200 experts and scholars from ten countries and regions attended.

NCL was primarily in charge of the session on Digital Libraries held on October 22. For the session, University Librarian Roxanne Missingham from Australia National University, Director-general Nafisah Ahmad from the National Library of Malaysia, and NCL’s Editor Dr. Chia-ning Chiang were invited to speak on “Creating Digital Content - Initiatives in the Parliament, Libraries and Museums,” “The Malaysian Ubiquitous Library Pilot Project: Bridging the Digital Divide,” and “Taiwan Citation Index in Humanities & Social Sciences.” A rich discussion with attendees followed their presentations, leading to deep exchange and interaction. After the session, NCL Director-general Shu-hsien Tseng took a photo with the moderator University Librarian, Professor Hsueh-hua Chen from the National Taiwan University, University Librarian Roxanne Missingham, Director-general Nafisah Ahmad, and Dr. Chia-ning Chiang, bringing a perfect end to the session.

The purpose behind establishing PNC is to accelerate information exchange and flow between countries along the Pacific Rim, thus becoming a close neighborhood. NCL’s　Director-general Tseng currently serves as convener of the PNC Library Workers Committee. This committee serves to share library resources with users throughout the world via the internet. For the last several years, it has also been in charge of planning the Digital Library session. This year NCL adopted the theme “Discovering Cultural Heritage: Museumification Transforms Image of Libraries” to explore the importance of how the museumification of libraries can recreate human cultural assets. This is a milestone in libraries’ function in knowledge preservation, transmission, and sharing. It also has imbued them with a new image.

University Librarian Roxanne Missingham and Director-general Nafisah Ahmad came to Taiwan a day before the PNC annual meeting (Oct. 20) to meet Director-general Tseng at NCL. They were given a tour of important digital resources at NCL, including special collections, manuscripts of famous persons, and material on Chinese studies. While touring the rare books room, both directors were overwhelmed at what they saw and were especially complementary regarding NCL’s methods and environment for preserving these rare books.

After touring NCL, Min-ling Yang the Director-general of the Ministry of Education’s International and Cross-Strait Education Department invited the two directors, along with Director-general Tseng, to have lunch with the former Minister of Education Wei-fan Guo. Discussion centered on many current issues and topics in education and culture.

In addition, NCL arranged for the two directors to visit Taiwan’s first green library, the Beitou branch of the Taipei Public Library, as well as the technological-advanced Library of National Tsing Hua University, National Taiwan University Library’s abundant special collections, and the Koo Chen-Fu Memorial Library, designed by the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Toyo Ito. Not only were they able to experience the variety of libraries in Taiwan, they also were deeply impressed by the Hakka culture in Hsin-chu, the bustling city of Taipei, and Taiwan’s unique sense of hospitality.