Premier Su Tseng-chang on Thursday received a Ministry of Culture (MOC) briefing on the Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank project, saying the many and varied stories of Taiwan's transformation from an authoritarian society to an open democracy must be preserved for future posterity. The memory bank allows the government to bring treasured materials from private sources into the public sphere as a common heritage of all the people. Old and historical materials are preserved and processed with new technologies to showcase Taiwan's proud achievements and its arduous journey to become the thriving democracy it is today.
The Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank serves much like a cultural bank for the nation, systematically and thematically collecting and archiving the country's memories into a centralized location. Digitized and formatted, the materials are presented from different perspectives such as education, industry and daily life to inform audiences of the elements of Taiwan's homegrown culture. Members of the public are also invited to write articles or submit other entries to make the memory bank a living, breathing database of Taiwan's cultural history.
Two months after officially going online, the Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank has more than 2.7 million items accessible. Premier Su instructed ministries and agencies to review their archives and files for historical value and deposit such material on the platform. He also directed that open-use licensing be approved to enable use by the public. This would allow the memory bank to become the nation's richest repository of history and culture and the most convenient way for people to get in touch with Taiwan's history.
The MOC highlighted the memory bank's four most distinctive features. First, it's a collectively constructed platform for cultural material centered around the memories of everyday people. The memory bank is also a smart application that organizes Taiwan's cultural materials by time and location. It provides further opportunities for the distribution, interpretation, transformation and use of stored material. Finally, it empowers a grassroots movement to capture a shared written record of Taiwan's culture.
The Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank's website (https://memory.culture.tw/) formally launched on October 17 in commemoration of Taiwan Culture Day. The MOC indicated that it looks forward to the public's continued use of digital-era cooperation and social networking capabilities to explore, document and record Taiwan's cultural memories, cultivating the rich soil of the island's culture and passing its spark and vitality on to future generations.