Page 259 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

258 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

principles and methodologies. To establish a fully-grown theory, it takes the ongoing efforts of
more scholars that offer different perspectives, draw on a variety of theoretical paradigms and
enrich and improve the knowledge system of LRP.

The inheritance and innovation of ancient book collation paradigm in the
digital environment

Mingjie LI 1 ∗

Collating ancient books has a long history in China and has formed a kind of relatively stable
pattern. In Han Dynasty, a famous philologist named Liu Xiang created a general procedure and a
set of methods to collate Chinese ancient books, which included collecting various editions of the
same book, choosing an appropriate title for the book, reordering papers, correcting words, making
a fair copy of the final version, cataloging and classifying books. This procedure and the set of
methods had developed into the basic paradigm of collating ancient books because of their wide
range of applications and profound academic influence in ancient China.
However, in the process of“Eastward spread of Western learning and cultural awareness”in
modern times, the basic structure of Chinese traditional learning which consisted of Confucian
classics, history, philosophy and belles-letters was broken. At the same time, some studies which
were formerly ignored got more attention and many new subjects appeared. As a result, a split
generated correspondingly in Liu Xiang’s generally applicable paradigm of collating ancient books.
From the perspective of Historiography, Literature and Library Science, this paper selected some
representative monographs on collating ancient books in these three disciplinary fields, introduced
and compared their different definitions about the concept of“ancient book collation”. On the
base of that, the author argues that Liu Xiang’s paradigm can be subdivided into four branches
in the present paper environment such as the paradigm of restoring the text of ancient books, the
paradigm of annotating ancient authors’ original ideas, the paradigm of cataloging and compiling
ancient books and the paradigm of preserving the physical entity of ancient books. The paper
analyzes the different principles for collating ancient books according to these four paradigms
and points out their respective function of paradigms in the traditional process of collating ancient
books.
Since the 1970s, with the wide application of modern information technologies based on
computer in the collation of ancient books, these four paradigms mentioned above have extended
themselves into the collation of digital ancient books from that of traditional paper ancient books
and a new paradigm of“datalizing”the knowledge in ancient books has been created gradually,
which means that the digital ancient books are not only the result of the collation but also the data

* Correspondence should be addressed to Mingjie LI, Email: lmjiewd@163.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-1876-9040