The Barrington Institute, with the support of Berkshire Publishing Group, is in the process of making available the Chinese Biographical Database. It was offline for several years due to the need for technical upgrades, now in progress. This preliminary view is not fully functional. The founder, Marilyn A. Levine, began with a vision for a resource that would grow and develop, with the input of the scholarly community, and for the benefit of that community and many others. The Barrington Institute shares that vision. --Karen Christensen, karen [at] berkshirepublishing [dot] com, 18 November 2010

Technical notes:

• Search is possible only in the Surname field at the moment.
• The Chinese characters were originally set up in a font that must be converted.

Introduction from the original website of the Chinese Biographical Database

The aim of the Chinese Biographical Database is to help develop new ways to utilize historical database materials via the internet. Many scholarly database sites have the main objective of making databases available through the process of downloading the database. On the other hand, database sites that are dynamic are often related to business or library and publication information. This database project aspires to develop a dynamic, scholarly moderated database that is not for downloading but for utilization and expansion online.

From the founder, Marilyn A. Levine: "During 1997-1998, funded by a research grant from the Idaho Board of Education, I was able to work on the creation of an online moderated database based on Chinese biography. This endeavor and the concept for it arose from two influences. First, for the last 3 years I have been exploring new learning technologies for teaching and professional service on several Web sites that I was able to develop [See Table 1]. The dimension that I found most intriguing was the interactive potentials on the Web, as well as the enormous integrative power. Secondly, after serving as an online editor for a Humanities and Social Sciences Online group (H-ASIA) for two years I really appreciated the validity of the foundation idea of scholarly, moderated online discussions. It occurred to me that the effort to duplicate data detracts from the interpretive power of historians. Thus, my conception of the Chinese Biographical Database Web site (CBD) was to have a scholarly moderated web site that would be shared dynamically online as opposed to a downloadable database."

Contributors & Acknowledgments

The Chinese Biographical Database and Web Site were designed and created by Marilyn A. Levine, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Eastern Oregon University. Zhou Baodi, Washington State University, and Erik Barnes, University of Idaho, entered biographical figures, based on the Saur archive and other sources. A special expression of gratitude goes to Stuart Culligan at the Information Technology Center at Lewis-Clark State College for his instruction on queries and dynamic linking between databases and web sites. For their support, we would also like to thank Maureen Donovan at Ohio State University; Rick Harbaugh, Yale University, and LCSC colleagues: Mary Emery, Paul Krause, Dan Regan, and the LCSC Information Technology Center for hosting the database.