Sponsor

Ken Klein
East Asian Library
kklein@usc.edu

Description

We have a database of excavation reports of tombs in China dating to the period of the 3rd to the 6th centuries A.D. Each of the 1700+ entries includes information about the location of the tomb and the specific period from which it dates. Also described are the layout and dimensions of each tomb, and a record of the contents of the excavated tombs.

The data is the work of a retired history professor and was originally input onto an old PC with a hard drive and one 5.25” floppy drive. It has now been migrated from its original Database format to an MS Access database, but still retains some offline (non-computerized) coding. We would like to develop a means of continuing to add new records to the database—and to edit the records already there—and to make the information web-accessible to a wide user base. As available, we would like to be able to add an image component to the database. All of the reports are written in Chinese, so we would also like to be able to make the database searchable in both English and Chinese. Ultimately, we would like to expand the database to include tomb reports from Japan, Korea, and Central Asia for the same period of history, and this would necessitate being able to display and search records in multiple languages.

Included in the location information for each report are the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of the tomb. We would like to take advantage of developing mapping technologies to be able to search and display the information in this database on digital maps, via a website. We would most like to develop the potential to display reported discoveries of particular features of archaeological discoveries (geographical distribution of particular types of items, etc.)