CADAL (China Academic Digital Associative Library) is a government-sponsored cooperative project of some 120+ academic libraries (2020), about half of which are from China, to create electronic resources for the use of their patrons. The venture is led by and housed in Zhejiang University, and most major Chinese academic institutions such as Peking, Qinghua, Fudan and Nanjing universities were participants from the beginning. CADAL originally grew out of a China-American Digital Academic Library venture, but only from the mid-2010s a select group of overseas libraries have received access.
The major resource created by CADAL is a collection of scanned books, both in and out of copyright: 240 thousand ancient texts (including the Xuxiu siku quanshu 续修四库全书), 180 thousand republican works, 155 thousand republican periodical issues, 40 thousand newspaper issues, 800 thousand post-1949 books, 690 thousand works in Western languages, 13 thousand special collection works, 4 thousand videos, 55 thousand audiobooks and 63 thousand images. The collection is constantly increasing. The titles are not full-text searchable; but tables of contents are provided for easy navigation. Lately CADAL has added some special sections for material connected to the Manchuria Railway 满铁 13 thousand titles, modern local gazetteers 17 thousand, material on overseas Chinese 侨批 50 thousand items, and oracle bones from various institutions including from Princeton scanned with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology.
(In addition to the e-books database, the navigation bar also gives access to some other resources: calligraphic works (shufa 书法), a literary timeline (Zhongguo wenxue biannian shi 中国文学编年史), Chinese medicine (zhongyiyao 中医药), and Audio (yinpinku 音频库). Note that the video choice, available only in English, brings one to the main e-books database.)
Access to the books is dependent on the copyright status of the book: while some free access is available, especially to the ancient texts, access to in-copyright books is restricted to registered users at participant libraries: one borrows parts of books, which need to be returned in order to have them become available to other users. Hence, one first has to register (zhuce 注册), and in subsequent visits to log-in (denglu 登录). For this please select 登录/注册 from the upper right of the CADAL home page. To register then click on 快速注册. Please note that it is not necessary to add a mobile phone number 手机号 in order to the register and it is also not necessary to retrieve a verification code if one does not want to connect the personal account to a Chinese mobile phone number. The registration process can be soley finished via a valid email. After registration, the system will ask for an affiliation at the first login. Please choose IP range and select “Princeton University” as your affiliation (suozai danwei 所在单位). The system will connect your account to Princeton for 180 days. For this to work you must be either using the system from a university computer (including within the library), or access the database via the library link at the top of this database description.
Activities one performs when logged-in, including borrowing books, note-taking etc., are visible to all users from search pages etc.: hence, make sure to log-out especially on shared public computers. One is not logged out automatically, even not after days. To log-out, go to one’s personal account page (registeredname’s CADAL in the English, registeredname的CADAL in the Chinese interface), and click on tuichu 推 出. This account page is available in the top navigation bar, and is also the page from where one returns books, see one’s borrowing history, etc. (One can choose to set the interface to English, but only a limited number of top-level screens have been translated.)
Once logged in, and directed to one’s account page, one can perform a simple search in the search box. On the resulting page, one can somewhat refine one’s search by limiting the result to title or author, and by selecting some rough facets of categories (such as ancient books or republican-period books—note that all categories are listed, even if not applicable), tags (biaoqian 标签 ) or publisher.
Under a cover image of each result, one can choose to see more details on the book, or decide to read it by clicking on the book. If choosing to read it, one is brought to a reader interface where one can display the table of contents, navigate forward and backward within a book, and change the display from one page to two pages at a time and vice versa. Printing (by right-clicking, one page at a time) does not work very well—it may be better to take screen shots.
Depending on the copyright status of the book, one will receive a request after viewing a couple of pages to check out the remainder of the chapter (jieyue 借阅). One receives a message that borrowing was successful (if the item was not borrowed by someone else), and can continue to read.
To return the chapter to the CADAL library, navigate to the borrowing page (jieyue in the top navigation bar), where one can see the status of one’s checking in-and-out. Click, if not yet selected, on the weihuan 未还button, and then return chapters by clicking on guihuan 归还 after each chapter one has checked out. And remember to log-out (also possible from this page.)
One can look at one’s notes, tags, comments, messages etc. from the navigation bar, and there may be recommendations listed based upon one’s readings.
Searching using the full text filter, you can read (and print) most articles. Sometimes there is a limit of what you can access at one time, but you can follow up with searches for the words at the end of those pages, etc.
Searching using the book title filter, you can read a limited number of pages directly on-line, but in many cases you can then email to yourself 50 pages or 1/5th of the book (whichever is less) at a time.
Some of the books can be purchased by the library for perpetual access; if you think we should purchase a recent book as an e-book please notify the Chinese Bibliographer (displayed in the rightmost column of this page). These will be available from the general catalog.
Wanfang’s New Local Gazetteers database. This database searches full-text versions of new (i.e., post-1949) local gazetteers, which are also browsable by region or topic. Pages are readable and downloadable in pdf form in some 6 million small parts by navigating through the Table of Contents (mulu), by clicking on “chakan yuanwen” (read original excerpt) or “xiazai yuanwen” (download original excerpt). You can also read through the complete gazetteers on line, by clicking on “zhengben yuedu” (reading full volume). More advanced searching (Boolean searching, fuzzy searching) is available, and you can narrow down results by using facets or adding refinements to your search (and clicking “search within results.”) As with all Wanfang databases, once on the Wanfang home page, you can move from database to database via tabs. The tab for the New Local Gazetteers, is somewhat hidden though; it is listed only on the very upper menu, under the “More…” (geng duo) category.
NOTE: The reading mode of this database currently does not work correctly when accessed via the library's EZproxy link. To use this feature please connect via Secure Remote Access (SRA/VPN) before entering the database.
Wenshi ziliao are collections on local history that are being published on all administrative levels in form of open-ended series. The collecting and editing of Wenshi ziliao was first suggested in April 1959 by Zhou Enlai to document the experience of modernization 60 years after the reform movement of 1898. Local 文史研究馆所 were set up and supported by the Political Consultative Conference. During the past 60+ years they have often changed from internal to open publications and back. Estimations of the amount of Wenshi ziliao issues are hovering between 80,000 to 100,000 volumes. Here table of contents indexes are available for searching on each administrative level (with some exceptions like Xinjiang), and the underlying PDFs can also be downloaded for local use. Altogether there are about 1,250 documents with about 45,800 pages of article information for about 500,000 articles.
So far online access is only available to a small subset of Wenshi ziliao. Lately the 抗日战争与近代中日关系文献数据平台of the CASS 近代史研究所 made some 16,000 volumes of Wenshi ziliao freely accessible.
