A database of more than 400,000 digitized photographs chronicling Taiwan's history was launched yesterday.
The gallery is the first part of the government-sponsored National Repository of Cultural Heritage -- a digital information collection platform to record the nation's cultural development -- to be completed.
The digital-photo gallery includes approximately 420,000 photos that cover the period from the Japanese colonization to the era of the KMT government.
The photos depict the important personalities, incidents and social activities that were pivotal to the history of Taiwan.
"These photos show a great deal of the difficulties of Taiwan's past," Council for Cultural Affairs Chairwoman Tchen Yu-chiou (陳郁秀) said yesterday at the launching ceremony.
"By compiling all these pictures in this digital old-photo bank, we are keeping our cultural assets alive, which is very different from simply renovating an old historical site," Tchen said. "This is the most important task for cultural policy."
"Viewing these photos, it seems we have gone back to those good old days and the photos give us immeasurable inspiration," she said.
The National Repository of Cultural Heritage -- when complete -- will house 12 categories of cultural information files, including fine arts, music, dance, theater, literature, architecture, film, ancient literary verses, and old pictures in the forms of words, pictures, sounds and visual images.
Sources of the photos included National Taiwan University's library, the Central News Agency, the Council of Cultural Affairs, private organizations and veteran photographers, who provided some of the very rare pictures.
The photo bank is available through the council's Web site (www.cca.gov.tw). However, the pictures cannot be downloaded.
The public is encouraged to add to the collection as well as to use it as an educational tool. The council is expected to open an online interactive workstation on which the public can incorporate whatever content they wish, utilizing the Web design techniques available on the Web site.
The council said the contents of the repository would also be incorporated into a systematic transaction mechanism designed by the Executive Yuan to regulate use of the cultural information.
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