By Lin Chiao-Mei

Translated by Gregory Laslo

Open access is an important trend in museums around the world. With techniques such as high-fidelity 3D scanning, literary artifacts can be digitized to create online virtual museums that are open around the clock. From conservation and collection to value-added applications, NMTL is building mutually beneficial cultural connections with the public, putting the Museum at our fingertips and literature at our side.

The theme of 2024’s International Museum Day was Museums for Education and Research. On that day, NMTL launched the exhibition Embedded (in) Literature on Open Museum, the online museum platform run by the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures and the Taiwan Museum Association (ROC). In the spirit of open access, NMTL uploaded careful selections from its own collection, including work from the Taiwan Shinminpo (New People Newspaper), books in Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ, a Romanization system for the Taiwanese language), Taiwanese opera lyrics, handwritten manuscripts, historical photographs, and more, all free of copyright and use restrictions. In this way, NMTL is exploring the many different ways that literature and literary artifacts can “embed” themselves in the lives of the public.

The Chinese term for “embedding” (zhìrù) does not always have a negative connotation —professionals at NMTL research and adapt literature all the time, teaching and promoting it in ways that connect it to our lives, making it, and literary artifacts, more accessible to the public. The content embedded in literature is all-encompassing: the exhibition starts with personal health and treatment issues, the most private domain of one’s life. It then expands outwards to encompass intimate relationships and cover other broad concepts such as culture, society, and the world along the way.

NMTL’s collection is focused primarily on contemporary and modern literature as well as literary artifacts. Finding items among these collections that can be promoted as open data is no easy feat. The foundation for any open data is an ongoing process of conducting inventories of collections and examining their usage rights, determining precisely what they can and cannot be used for. How can literature, literary artifacts, and literature museums work together with modern society to create fertile ground where all can grow? Perhaps the answer is closer than we think: No matter the scope of a piece of writing, from narratives of personal emotions to the roles and interpretations of concepts such as family and country, literature is all around us. Times are changing—in the spirit of open access, literature museums will no longer be confined by their physical walls. Literary resources placed in the digital world acquire yet another way of entering our lives, reminding us that literature is everywhere.

 For more information on “Embedded (in) Literature,” click here.