Building a web collection of the Chinese community

Studenten aan de slag bij het Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed

Since February 2018, I have been doing a Web Archiving internship at the National Library (KB). First of all, I would like to introduce myself. I am a Chinese student studying Heritage and Memory Studies at University of Amsterdam (UvA). I introduce my English name Kitty Lin here in the Netherlands and my Chinese name is Lin Tong 林潼. Since an internship is part of the educational trajectories of this master’s program at UvA, my previous work experience in Macau Memory Project 澳門記憶, which is about digitizing cultural heritage in Macau, led me to Digital Heritage Network and the internship at the KB.

My assignments for the internship includes two parts: 1) Research about building web collections for the KB’s web archives and 2) Building a web collection of the Chinese community in the Netherlands. Right now you might get a little confuse about the terms “web archive” and “web collection”. “A web archive is not an archive, in a sense of a place in which public records or historical documents are preserved.”[1] So what is a web collection? And what does “building web collections” mean? I consider building a web collection as an analogy to assemble a book, which makes more sense in a library’s perspective. A book has its binding, cover style, text style, and paper trait that says something about the book. Whereas web archives do not have these obvious characteristics. Building a web collection means adding context information to the collection and making connections with the harvested websites. This means that web archives are more readable as web collections.

Websites are short-lived and they are alive for 90 days! The KB started web archiving in 2007, based on a selective approach. The current KB web collection does not contain websites from immigrant communities. Being a Chinese and growing up in China, these “gifted-talents” make me a qualified person to collect websites about/of the Chinese community in the Netherlands. At first I thought this was a quick and easy task to do as. I assumed that there should be a rather small amount of websites about/of the Chinese community. As my research goes on, I have found more than 150 websites about/of the Chinese community! Now I think there should be more websites about/of the Chinese community waiting to be discovered. The websites that I have found yet are very diverse, which reflects the Chinese community, as this is also very diverse. Therefore, the online presence of them is very diverse as well. According to a research done by Dr. Li Minghuan, the Chinese immigrants first appeared in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 20th century. Based on her research, the Chinese community can be divided into several sub-groups: the Guangdong 廣東 people, the Zhejiang 浙江 people, Indonesian Chinese, Suriname Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese Chinese, Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese.[2] As someone from the Guangdong group, I am aware of this diversity and the difference among sub-groups. As a student from heritage and memory studies, I hope the web collection could reflect this diversity and represent these sub-groups. This is my principle idea of making the Chinese community web collection.

The most important products of the internship will be an advisory report about how the KB can build a special web collection, a list of the Chinese community web collection and a description about the Chinese community web collection. These will be completed at the end of my internship in mid-July. I am quite happy with this internship. Because I was not sure about my interest of heritage and memory studies before. And now I am sure that I want to develop a career in digital heritage after finishing my study at UvA.

[1] Barbara Sierman and Kees Teszelszky, “How can we improve our web collection? An evaluation of webarchiving at the KB National Library of the Netherlands (2007-2017),” in Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues, 27.2 (2017): 94-107.
[2] Li Minghuan, ‘We need Two Worlds’: Chinese Immigrant Associations in a Western Society (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 27-52.