The Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library has recently added two online Chinese databases that should be of great use to researchers in a wide variety of subjects, from ancient philosophy to contemporary zoology, and just about everything in between.

Sitting in the comfort of one's own office or home, one can call up, search for, and download articles from the China Academic Journals database, which contains almost 2,000 Chinese journals from 1994 to the present. The breadth of articles and subjects is impressive. To take some random samples from the year 2001, one can call up: “Plume Contamination Computation of Remainder-propellant for Launch Vehicles,” from the Chinese Journal of Computational Physics; “Folk Rituals and State Presence,” from the Peking University Journal; and “A New Approach to Solving the Problem of Inner-City Poverty in America,” in Urban Problems.

For researchers whose interests stretch back in time, the CHANT (Chinese Ancient Texts) database begins, appropriately enough, at the beginning of Chinese writing with over 50,000 jiaguwen texts,  inscriptions, mostly for the purpose of divination, incised on tortise shells and bones, dating back to around 3,500 BC. From there the database moves on to encompass all the important early texts up to around the year 600 AD, as well as virtually all the extent, fascinating Chinese encyclopedias known as leishu, the last of which – consisting of no less than 6,109 volumes – was published in 1725.

China Academic Journals Database

Consists of the full text and full images of 1,858 Chinese language journals in the Literature/History/Philosophy, Economics/Politics/Law, and Education/Social Science sections of the database. Covers from 1994 to present and is updated daily. Can be searched by author, title, and key words, etc. Has an abstract for each article. Articles can be downloaded.

CHANT (Chinese Ancient Texts) Database

A searchable full-text database focusing on pre-600 AD traditional and excavated Chinese texts. Covers six subjects: language, classics, history, philosophy, literature, and science & technology. Includes author index and title index.

For further information, visit the Chinese Electronic Rescoures page of the East Asian Libary website

www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/eastasian