"Traditions of Exemplary Women" China Trip Report, May 25-June 2, 2004

Purpose

The goal of this trip was to negotiate a final agreement with the National Library of China (NLC) to purchase digital rights to eleven rare, illustrated and annotated editions of the Lienü zhuan and associated original documents for publication on the Traditions of Exemplary Women web site.

Personnel

The group consisted of Anne Kinney (Project Director), Sarah Wells (Project Manager), and Ming Lung (East Asia Librarian).

Summary

Our primary contacts from the NLC Rare Books and Special Collections Department were:

Zhang Zhiqing, Director of the Department of Rare Books
Zhao Qian, Vice-Research Librarian, Department of Rare Books
Cheng Youqing, Librarian, Department of Rare Books
Yan Xiangdong, Director of the NLC International Cooperation Division

From left to right: Zhao Qian, Cheng Youqing, Ming Lung, Anne Kinney, Yan Xiangdong, Zhang Zhiqing

Before we left, we forwarded a draft contract to Mr. Zhang and other Rare Book staff for discussion. Their main concerns were to identify quality control problems that are likely to arise when working with delicate documents and to clarify ambiguities in the language concerning copy right. We settled on a production and delivery timeline and discussed technical issues related to our requirements for page images and textual mark-up. We were able to resolve most issues to both sides' satisfaction, although we decided that we needed to return home and write up another draft of the contract in consultation with a UVa lawyer and digital rights expert for the exact language to be used in describing the permission and rights that we are purchasing from the NLC.

The NLC will be creating page images and text files of the documents, which will also include transriptions of the hand-written notes of eminent scholars and illustrations of the biographies. We were delighted to learn that the NLC would be able to complete the entire project in two rather than three years.

The Texts

The NLC drew up a list of thirteen proposed texts for us. After eliminating some duplicates, we settled up on a set of eleven texts. The texts are shown below.

忿忿忤仿忿女传丿忷
Liu Xiang Gu Jin Lienü zhuan qi juan