From January to April, Asian Library presented an exhibition on Li Desheng’s collection of cigarette cards under the title “Knowing 360 Jobs in Old China”.  At the same time our GAA student Daisy Hui and her two fellows, Kimberly Garmoe and Sehdeep Kaur, at the UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) also initiated a digitization project on Li’s collection.

According to Daisy, this is the project for the course LIBR 582 Digital Images and Text Collections.  “I attended Li’s lecture during the Library’s New Year celebration. It’s really interesting, but I also noticed that it is not easy to get access to those cards because they are private collections.   So the idea of digitizing Li’s collection came into my mind as it would be useful for researchers who are interested in this area and also may attract those potential researchers.”

Both Kimberly and Sehdeep were happy about her idea. “We hope to see this can serve as a pilot project to increase the visibility of private collections existed in our community.  We would like to act as the bridge between researchers and valuable collection holders,” said Daisy.

Li Densheng has in his collection some 20,000 pieces of cigarette advertising materials.  Considering the limited amount of time they have for the course project, they three decided to pick and digitize about 60 cigarette cards.  The project now comes to the end and it turns out to be a great success, in terms of the presentation of the aesthetic beauty of the cigarette cards on the website as well as the accessible text information on the cards.

Everyone can visit http://cdm15935.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15935coll63 to view Daisy, Kimberly and Sehdeep’s work. Feedback are very welcome.