Between October 2011 and September 2015, Mr Nicholas Coulson and the Tan Chin Tuan Foundation sponsored me to conduct a four-year project to progress the work of cataloguing and digitising Bodley's pre-modern Chinese holdings. It is known as the Serica Project, and its website has been designed to showcase these holdings, giving an overview of their extent and nature, and presenting the bibliographic data in a way that is readily comprehensible to Chinese readers. It provides specimen pages (書影) of many of the editions, also provides a classified list of the Library's pre-modern Chinese works that have been digitised.
Since I ceased to be on the Library's payroll in October 2017, I had been voluntarily updating the website with newly catalogued and digitised material, as well as making corrections to existing entries where necessary. But without informing me, and with no explanation, in the autumn of 2021 the Library shut off my access to the database, which is therefore becoming increasingly out of date. So going forward, I am making all such addenda and corrigenda available here, with a view to making the unified dataset available on my own server in due course.
Some notes on old Chinese books in the Bodleian Library's collections and on old Chinese books in general.
Collectors' seals on Chinese books in the Bodleian Library
Materials inaccessible from Library catalogues
The pre-modern Chinese collections contain things that can be catalogued only with difficulty, and sometimes not at all. I'm trying to make lists of them, and have made a start here.
Survey of Chinese "special collections" in the Bodleian Library
This survey documents the provenance and current location of all the so-called "special collections" of Chinese books in the Bodleian Library. It was originally compiled in December 2012 for the benefit of the National Library of China, with which the Bodleian had an evanescent memorandum of understanding, and I update it from time to time.
Chinese books in Europe in the seventeenth century
A list of books which came to Europe in the seventeenth century, under constant review as more examples are discovered.
Stone Age thinking at the speed of light – AACR2, MARC, and other dinosaurs
Book Arts Press Lecture 116 (17 March 1983) by John Jolliffe, who was Bodley's Librarian from 1982 until his untimely death in 1985. His paper demonstrates the inadequacies of library automation orthodoxy, and together with my annotations introduces some of the principal personalities involved in its construction.
David Helliwell
26 January 2022