Digital content specialists from around the Pacific Rim convened at the City University of Hong Kong between December 1 and 3 for the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) 2010 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings. This year’s conference is entitled “From Digital Content to Knowledge Asset”. Academia Sinica Vice Presidents Chao-Han Liu and Fan-sen Wang led a group of Taiwan researchers to join the conference.

This year’s keynote speeches were delivered by: Academia Sinica Vice President Fan-sen Wang Director of the National Digital Archives Program of Taiwan, who presented the program’s latest advancements in digital assets storage; Dr. Pan Yunhe, Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and President of the China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL); Dr. M. S. Vijay Kumar, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Principal Investigator of the Open Knowledge Initiative, who gave a talk entitled “The Open Influence: Towards an Ecology of Abundance”; Dr. Jeffrey Shaw, Dean and Chair Professor of Media Art at City University of Hong Kong, who gave a talk entitled “Immersive Strategies for the Embodiment of Culture and Heritage”; Dr. Tak-Wai Chan, a professor at the National Central University of Taiwan and a pioneer of technology enhanced learning in Taiwan, who gave a talk entitled “A Few Problems of Digital Learning”; and Mr. She Mang of the Education Bureau of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. 

Ensuing panel discussions and talks explore digital content as a knowledge asset. They feature such topics as “Biodiversity Data Integration in Taiwan and Linkages with Global Databases” as part of a series of lectures on fish databases and fish diversity in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; “Collecting Knowledge in the Wiki Way” and “Preservation and accessibility of the multimedia resources of the Central University Of Tibetan Studies.”

The conference was attended by representatives from institutions which lead digital archive study around the globe, including: Stanford University Libraries, University of Southern California Libraries, Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Kansai University of Japan, Seoul National University, Cheju National University of South Korea, Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT), Egypt, National Taiwan University, and the National Palace Museum, Taiwan. Of note, this year’s event has attracted more scholars from the Chinese-speaking world than any previous PNC conference. Representatives will include National Taiwan University, National Chengchi University, National Taiwan Normal University, National Chiao Tung University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, Beijing Normal University, The University of Hong Kong, and the University of Macau. The conference has been strongly supported by the City University of Hong Kong, currently under the leadership of President Way Kuo, an Academician of Academia Sinica.  

The Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC), founded at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, aims to facilitate information exchange among institutions of higher education in the Pacific Rim through computing and communications technology. In fostering access to digitized data around the region, the PNC serves as a network for scholarly communities to collaborate through the use of resources from three major establishments – digital libraries, digital museums and electronic learning infrastructures that help connect a virtual neighborhood. The main headquarters of the PNC was relocated to Taiwan from Berkeley in 1997. 

Conference website: http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2010/english/program.html