Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society reviewed that all the major public libraries which include Hong Kong Central Library, libraries at City Hall, Kowloon, Shatin, Tuen Mun, Tsuen Wan and even the RAS Collection have incomplete holdings of the Journal. Since it is important to keep the Journal up-to-date, copies of all missing volumes, including the Indexes and Seminars, were provided to all the public libraries at the Society's expense. While Hong Kong Central Library will continue to receive one free copy that comes with the Library's institutional membership, payment will be made for renewals for the Journal for the other five branches.
It has been the normal practice of the Hong Kong Public Libraries to record subject talks conducted at their venues. Prior consent is sought from the speakers to do this. For legal protection, Council Members agreed that RAS speakers will also be requested to sign the same form for RAS lectures. In order to better preserve the content, it was decided that tapes of RAS speakers will be digitized if permission is granted. The Hong Kong Central Library has kindly offered, free of charge, to digitize these tapes since they are produced by the Library. The digitized version will be stored in the Multimedia Information System, available for convenient access in the larger Public Libraries via the System. The RAS Library will also be given one audio CD for each of the tape digitized for borrowing or archival purpose.
Hong Kong Central Library has also sent us a list of past recordings of all the RAS lectures held at City Hall Library, 78 in total dating back to 1988. Since none of the speakers had given consent to record their talks before and it would not be feasible to seek retroactive consent, it was agreed that while these tapes will be digitized for preservation purpose, the CDs will be placed in the RAS Collection in Rare Book Room, available for use in the Library but not for loan. The audio tapes will also be stored in the Rare Book Room, serving as back-ups.
Another digitization project that will be undertaken by RAS is a collection of old RTHK radio programmes related to the history of Asia and Hong Kong. Due to limited resources, these tapes probably will not be digitized by RTHK. In order to preserve the culture and heritage of Asia, Council members expressed interest and investigations will be conducted into the feasibility of digitization and projected demand for the finished project.
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