Hong Kong's Public Records Office to Go On-line

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, August 17, 2002

Hong Kong's Public Records Office to Go On-line

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The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government's public document archive containing a cache of 800,000 documents is set to go on-line in October, a senior archivist told Xinhua Friday.

The new arrangement means that research into the life and historical events in Hong Kong will be able to be conducted from any corner of the world.

According to Senior Assistant Archivist of the HKSAR Public Records Office Jessica Lau, the office contains the documents dating back to the mid-1840s, including 5,000 photographs dating to 1860 and some of Hong Kong's past audio-visual productions, maps, government posters and books, and their catalogues will be able to be accessed via the Internet.

Soon, a Canadian-built information retrieval system will be installed and enable the archive catalogues in both Chinese and English languages to be accessed, and the international community will have the opportunity to view part of the scanned photographicimages of the documents on-line, she said.

"Despite the strict nine-to-five kind of office hours at the office in Kwun Tong in Kowloon, the new on-line service will bringmuch convenience to researchers who want to access the catalogues of documents to identify the needed files before actually coming to the archive to call out the physical documents," she said.

Documents ranging from land deeds, court records, judges' notebooks, correspondence of the secretaries with various Hong Kong government departments, memos and minutes are available for public research, she said.

Now, with secondary schools in Hong Kong having improved their courses to include more field research, the office has become increasingly popular among teachers and students. About 55 group visits are conducted annually in recent years for teachers and students, Lau said.

Throughout the years, the office has been a popular venue not just among historians, but also university and college students, genealogists, journalists, government officials, lawyers, and visitors engaged in activities such as film and documentary production. But Lau said the office is set to put in greater effort to encourage more active use of its services.

When the second phase of digitization of the office takes placesometime to be determined in 2003, an on-line digital classroom will be built to provide topical arrangements of certain interesting documents, such as an index to old streets from 1890s to 1930s and architecture in Hong Kong. "History teachers will find this particularly useful in terms of preparing their lessons," she said.

She said as more and more people in Hong Kong are interested inthe local history of Hong Kong, the office is planning to scan themost sought-after government publications and upload them onto thesystem so that the full details of such documents can be accessed via the Internet.

Meanwhile, webpages showcasing 200 interesting historical sources will also be featured on the site, such as the 1882 Chadwick Report on sanitary conditions of Hong Kong in the 19th century, a pictorial record of Chinese products from 1948 to 1955 and a tourists' map of eight short trips on the Chinese mainland in 1896, Lau said. Also featured will be the fire at the old Kai Tak International Airport in 1931 and detrimental Typhoon Wenda which struck Hong Kong in 1962.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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