Construction of the southern branch of the National Central Library is to begin in September, after a bid of NT$5.7 billion (US$190.3 million) was accepted for the project, the library said at a contract-signing ceremony in Taipei yesterday.
Work on the new branch, which was initially approved by the Executive Yuan on Dec. 28, 2017, had been stalled due to the tender being abandoned 14 times, the library said.
The new branch is to be built in Tainan’s Sinying District (新營) and aims to make the library’s services available to a younger audience and those in southern Taiwan, as well as to provide more space for the library’s collections, a Ministry of Education news release said on Dec. 14 last year.
Image provided by the National Central Library
Among the facilities at the new branch would be a children’s and adolescents’ literary works data center that would store historical data about children’s works in Taiwan and aid research into the evolution of children’s publications.
Deputy Minister of Education Lin Teng-chiao (林騰蛟) said that digital resources are lost faster than printed resources, so the museum felt it was prudent to establish a digital resource preservation center.
“This is a project that the Ministry of Education and the Tainan City Government are greatly anticipating,” Lin said. “It is symbolic of what we can achieve by combining our efforts and it is symbolizes the value we place on our nation’s culture.”
Citing Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che’s (黃偉哲) response to news of the successful bid, Tainan Cultural Affairs Bureau Director-General Yeh Tse-shan (葉澤山) said the mayor described it as “the greatest new development” affecting the city in years.
The new branch is to cover an area of roughly 51,000m*2*, with the main facility housing collections and services across five floors and a basement, the library said.
The campus is to have 80 percent tree coverage and a park for reading outdoors, as well as an incubation center for start-ups, it said.
The branch was designed by architect Chang Ching-hua (張清華), who is best known for her emphasis on green spaces. Her works include the Beitou branch of Taipei Public Library and the Taipei Expo Park’s Xinsheng Area.
Construction was originally estimated to take 820 days, but that has been increased to 1,200 days.
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
PUBLIC POLL: More than half believe Chinese drills would make Taiwanese less willing to unify with China, while 36 percent said an invasion was highly unlikely Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points. Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said. Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said. Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
RSS