Imagine for a moment that while writ-ing an article or talking in a public venue, you show your erudition with a quote from Confucius only to have someone point out that what you have quoted is, in fact, Mengzi's "King Liang Hui." How would you feel?

Do you often wonder about the contemporaneous development of Western and Eastern civilization? For example, did you know that the Buddha and Socrates lived in the same era, as did Cleopatra and the Han dynasty's Empress Lu?

How does one go about searching among the existing mountains of historical documents and data? The History Links website (www.saturn.ihp. sinica. edu.tw/~liutk/shih/), which was named one of YamWeb Navigator's top 100 websites last year, might be a good place to start.

At the impetus of colleges, universities, research institutions and the government, Taiwan has digitized a great deal of literary and historical data over the last several years. Now, information available on the Internet brings together the ancient and the modern, China and the outside world. There is a tremendous amount of data available, and at History Links, which contains links to some 600 websites around the world, you can find it all.From bookmarks to a website

Liu Tseng-kui, a research associate at the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology, created History Links' basic structure out of his personal collection of website bookmarks, accumulated over years of combing overseas websites for historical data for his research. In the course of his research, Liu discovered that while there was no dearth of literary and historical websites in Taiwan, there were few online collections of links to such sites. He therefore assembled his own site last year, dividing his vast collection of bookmarks into categories.

Accessing History Links, one is stunned by the number and variety of these categories. From "Institutions Studying History" to "Chinese History," "Taiwanese History," and "World History" to "Electronic Databases of Literature" and "Search Engines," there are a total of 15 categories of links, all "caught in one net."

In general, there are three types of literary and historical websites on the Internet: those that contain primary sources, those that provide write-ups of research and those that offer digitized images. The primary-source type is exemplified by the Academia Sinica's website, which provides access to items such as the Twenty-five Histories (Sishiwu Shi), the Thirteen Classics (Shisan Jing) and the Four Books (Si Shu). The second type of site focuses on research reports. An example is the site hosted by the National Central Library which provides information such as its card catalogue and an index of periodicals. The third variety of site contains digitized images. Examples of this variety of website include another site hosted by the National Central Library which contains a multimedia archive of ancient Chinese texts and the Academia Sinica's Database of Images of Cultural Artifacts. There are also comprehensive sites, which house both primary source materials and write-ups of research on some particular topic. Examples of this variety of website include Yuan-Ze University's Dream of the Red Chamber database and the database of the Center for Buddhist Studies at National Taiwan University.

If databases are categorized based on their features, there are again basically three kinds: those which only allow visitors to read data, those which have search capabilities (a revolutionary contribution to research) and those which provide space for online discussions.

It is thus important to know of what type a database or site is. The titles of the "Full Text Search," "Electronic Databases of Literature" and "Book Look-up" categories on the History Links site and their brief descriptions give visitors an overview of the links they contain.

All the links in the "Full Text Search" category connect to searchable databases. The largest of these is the Academia Sinica's Chinese documents database, which contains 140 million words of data and has a powerful full-text search engine. With this engine, you can simultaneously search more than one hundred classics, including the Twenty-five Histories and the Thirteen Classics, for occurrences of one particular word or phrase. For example, if you want to find the origin of the sentence "If you listen to someone's words and watch their eyes, how can they hide anything from you?" all you have to do is enter all or part of it into the search line. In two seconds, the search engine returns the "Li Lou" chapter of Mengzi.

Originally, a portion of this archive was available only on a fee basis. However, in order to meet the needs of Taiwan's educational system, the Aca-demia Sinica last year gathered some portions of this archive together into the "Humanities Database for Students and Teachers" which is available to the public free of charge. Taking the Twenty-five Histories as an example, all of the "Emperors" section is available online, as well as those portions of the "Imperial Court" and "Famous Persons" sections which form a part of the island's high-school curriculum. None of the "Geography" section is available yet. A punctuated version of the Thirteen Classics is online, as well as other selected texts including the Four Books, Laozi, Chuangzi and the Zhanguo Ce. All of the New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo Xinyu) and the Taiwan Local Gazeeters (Taiwan Fangzhi) are also available on the site, making for a total of some 50 million words to which the public has access.

The Chinese-language database of the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology is also very useful. This full-text-searchable archive differs from the humanities database in that it contains a catalogue of Tang, Song, Ming and Qing history books, Han dynasty yuefu poems, the Three Character Classic (San Zi Jing), The Dream of the Red Chamber, the famous Collection of Three Hundred Tang Poems, and Ming and Qing records.

Yuan-Ze University's "Internet Reading Room" is another important site which has a full-text search engine. The database includes shi-, ci-, and qu-style poems from every dynasty as well as The Dream of the Red Chamber. A special feature of the site is the numerous fields which can be searched-author, title, line and composite searches are all possible. For example, suppose you wanted to find lines from the shi-style poetry of Su Shi which concerned drinking tea. First, you would go to the Song-dynasty shi search page. If you requested lines of poetry about tea, it would return all the lines concerning tea written by Song poets. If you did a composite search, entering Su Shi in the author field and tea in the line field, the engine would return all fifty lines from Su's shi poetry which concerned tea. If you then wanted to see the entire text of a particular poem, you would simply click on the line from that poem and the entire poem would appear.

The database of Taiwan University's Center for Buddhist Studies is another popular website with a historical theme. The main foci of the institute's research include Buddhist philosophy, history, literature and art, and the institute's database includes documents from both China and elsewhere. It is Taiwan's most complete Buddhist archive. Visitors to the site can conduct searches for Buddhist catalogues and periodicals in the original language, but text searches can only be done on Chinese language items.

The links to the ancient texts and historical research of both East and West on the "Electronic Databases of Literature" page bring new life to these ancient materials. Among the more popular links are: the Academia Sinica's Chinese literature and poetry database; the Xin Yu Si Electronic Library, a site built by mainland Chinese students in the US which includes a great deal of mainland Chinese literature and history; EuroDocs, a large database containing information on Western history; and the Project Gutenberg Index.

The "Electronic Databases of Literature" page contains links to sites which allow a visitor to find data such as an ancient text in the original language or the works of a particular writer. For example, if you wanted to find the text of Lu Xun's Pang Huang, you could search Xin Yu Si's database. If you were looking for the works of Shakespeare or another Western author, you could check the Project Gutenberg site.

History Links' "Full Text Search" and "Electronic Databases of Literature" pages both provide links which allow visitors to search for original texts and pictures. The "Book Search" and "Periodicals and Magazines" pages, on the other hand, provide visitors with the means to search for research and reference works. In addition to providing a link to the National Library's well-known "Global Information Network," the "Book Search" page allows visitors to search 10 databases at the National Library, including its card catalogue, the tables of contents of research journals, its index of current periodicals and its database of modern literature and images. And you can use any one of several methods to search, including the name of the work, the name of the author, the date of publication or even key words.

In the case of esoteric works or those not in the National Library's collection, "Book Search" has numerous other features which can help. For example, it lists several Internet book stores which are linked to book search systems in mainland China and Hong Kong. You can search for documents pertaining to Chinese medicine and old questions from national examinations via National Chiao Tung University's webpage. And Tung Nan Jr. College of Technology has a search system for imported books.

History Links' "Periodicals and Magazines" page is also well stocked, containing links to more than 40 domestic and foreign academic journals and other periodicals.Know your search engines

Liu Tseng-kui noticed that the most frequently asked question in the chatroom on his website was, "Where can I find X information?" History Links therefore has many ways to search for data besides those mentioned above. Many students who are just beginning their term papers or research do not have information such as book and thesis titles. What can these people do? Liu recommends beginning with a search engine. At History Links, you can go to the "Search Tools" page. Once you arrive here, perhaps the most suitable place to start your historical or literary research is the GAIS (Global Area Information Servers) search engine developed by National Chung Cheng University. A special feature of this engine is that it not only searches for World Wide Web sites, examining all of a site's pages, but that it can also search articles posted on the chat areas of BBSs in Taiwan. Liu says that GAIS was of great help when he was building History Links.

When using GAIS to search, language is very important. Not only can you use the "key words" approach that everyone is familiar with, but also Boolean searches and multi-parameter searches with which you can limit or expand the scope of a search. For example, if you are looking for information about Hu Shih and the May Fourth Movement, using the Boolean "and" function, enter "Hu Shih & May Fourth Movement." If you want to find out something about Chiang Kai-shek and the 2-28 Incident, you might use functions such as "+," "-" and "," entering "(Chiang Kai-shek, Jiang Jieshi,CKS) + 228 Incident."

Liu's inclusion of a "Search Engines" page at History Links reflects the importance of these engines. In addition to GAIS, other engines on this page include WhatSite.com, Kimo.com, YamWeb Navigator and Alta Vista. The "Search Engines" page also contains a link to the "Detailed Listing of Taiwan's BBS Discussion Groups," which includes two such groups which involve history. A visit to either will provide you with a glimpse what sort of historical questions are of interest to people online.

The "History Chatroom" page provides ordinary people with a place where they can discuss any question related to history. Liu says that the discussions tend to be passionate, with many young graduate students offering up their views and solutions to questions involving society at large. He hopes that more scholars of history will begin visiting the site more often, too, sharing the results of their research with the public and using the stimulation of the public to broaden their own research perspective. In October, Liu plans to further organize his chatroom, increasing its utility by dividing it into sections based on topic.

The "Taiwanese History" page has links to two major databases: Academia Sinica's "Taiwan Research Online" and the National Taiwan University Library's (NTUL) full-text-searchable database of works on Taiwanese history and culture. Academia Sinica began implementing its three-year database plan in 1996. The plan calls for the establishment of an online year-by-year history, archaeological, reference work, English texts and surveys databases, some of which will be searchable online. The NTUL database includes the archives of Japanese historian Ino Yoshinori and data on the aboriginal plains tribes.

In addition to these two large sites, the "Taiwanese History" page at History Links also includes links to databases containing information on everything from Taiwan's aboriginal cultures, Hakka history, historical relics and the 2-28 Incident to Taiwanese literary works, Taiwanese opera (a site which includes samples of music) and pictures of aboriginal artifacts. There is even a link to a site which provides educational materials on Taiwan to primary- and middle-school teachers.

You can get to History Links via the "History" page under the "Humanities" page at HiSearch Yam. Or you can access it by going to the Academia Sinica's homepage, then choosing the Institute of History and Philology. Once you get there to History Links' homepage you will see a button marked "Download simplified Chinese and Japanese and Korean website [viewing] software." This program (NJWin) is shareware provided by NJStar Software, which translates simplified Chinese characters into complex ones and vice versa, as well as allowing netsurfers to view Japanese and Korean language websites.

Web address: http://saturn.ihp.sinica. edu.tw/~liutk/shih