I just found out that Columbia University has relaunched its project putting the Chinese women’s magazine Ling long (玲瓏, “elegant and fine”）online.
You can visit the newly updated site here:
The Ling Long Women’s Magazine
I have linked and blogged about the project before, even using the project as an example of a relatively easy way libraries can contribute to resources online in a way immediately useful to other historians, but there have been some great improvements in presentation this time. As before, you can view images from most pages of the magazine from 1931 to 1937. However, the site is now much more pleasant and sports a new interface for finding pages and viewing multiple pages while scanning through articles.
Also new is an article by my friend Elizabeth LaCouture, a PhD student at Columbia University about the magazine which is also available in PDF format, along with a bit more about the project and the collection.
The project is well worth visiting, and I can only hope that many more of these great sources make their way online.
Thank you for posting this Konrad! CV Starr Library is interested in getting more Asian-language materials on line, so hopefully we haven’t seen the last of this. As researchers we can also take the lead in trying to get our institutions to initiate these kinds of projects, which facilitate research and protect disintegrating materials. I was very fortunate that Columbia CV Starr Library included me as a researcher who had used the site extensively on the project. I was able to suggest certain browser functions (like the two and four page views) to make scanning the magazine for headlines more efficient and user friendly.
I have also tried to make this very visual magazine more accessible to non-Chinese readers (global historians or undergraduates). Each section of the introduction guides the user in how to “read” the magazine’s pictures and includes a slide show with translated captions that link back to the magazine. I have also translated a few articles, obtainable in links at the end of each section. If someone has translations of Ling long articles to add to these they can be forwarded to the CV Starr Library.