The National Science Council (NSC) purchased five on-line databases, at a cost of NT$ 110,000,000, for the academic institutions of Taiwan in 2006. TKU completed their installation at the beginning of March this year and will release them for open access soon.

These five databases are “Eighteenth Century Collections Online” (ECCO), “Early English Books Online” (EEBO), “Early American Imprints” (EAI), “The Making of the Modern World” (MOMW), and “Periodical Archive Online” (PAO). They cover books, documents and periodicals that span over 500 years of studies in various disciplines in Europe and North America. Such a collection is equivalent of having an additional 400,000 books.

Tamkang Library (TL) believes such an investment is necessary. Currently, Tamkang Library has a budget of NT$ 17,000,000 for electronic databases and another NT$ 58,000,000 for e-journals and traditional periodicals. Dr. Huang Hong-chu, the Director of TL once said some years ago that purchasing e-databases was like buying an 8.41 carat diamond—expensive but extremely valuable. With the installation of these five on-line databases, the worth of the TL collection will certainly increase. So far, there are 347 e-databases and 46,000 e-journals available in the library. Yet, the expansion continues. For 2007 alone, the library has subscribed to over 2,700 e-journals and traditional periodicals in Chinese and other major world languages.

In addition to the 5 databases, TL also installed 6 more online databases in Chinese last week. The 6 databases are “Chronicles of Post-War Taiwan”, “Transcripts of Telecommunication News in China (1966-1988)”, “Chinese Telecommunications”, “Taiwan Television”, “Taiwan Humanities Citation Index”, and “Taiwan Cinema”. Besides these, databases of “Harvard Business Review Complex Chinese Version”, “BRILL E-journal” and “IOS Press E-journal”, which provide access to over 180 journals, are in trial use. ( ~Ying-hsueh Hu )