This memorynet.org site will be the home of a major U. S. National Science Foundation/Interntional Digital Library Project (NSF/IDLP), entitled Chinese Memory Net (CMNet) (NSF/IDLP/IIS-9905833) under the overall supervision of Dr. Ching-chih Chen, Professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, MA 02115. CMNet's goal is to develop a model of international collaboration for Global Memory Net. The main portion of CMNet will be its extensive image collection (described in the following). It will also has a video component, the CMNet archival information as well as information related to the collaborative research activities. This site will also house all the archival information related to Prof. Chen's award winning PROJECT EMPEROR-I on her interactive videodisc and multimedia CD-ROM project, entitled The First Emperor of China (originally published by the Voyager Co. in 1989 and 1991 respectively). PROJECT EMPEROR-I was supported by the U. S. National Endowment for the Humanities. Interest and inquiries on these and this site should be addressed to Prof. Chen (chen @ simmons.edu).

The CMNet project concentrates on all relevant images related to Chinese Memory. Currently thousands of images are mostly those related to the First Emperor of China's 7000+ Terracotta Warriors and Horses in Xian, but the image collection is expanding fast to include other collaborated projects, both ancient and contemporary. In order to search the images quickly, accurately and effectively, extensive traditional search capabilities, such as by title, location, keyword, etc. will be provided. In addition, cutting-edge semantic content-based image retrieval capabilities will also be provided as shown in the graphic (left). Users can search images by random, similarity, and an URL address of an image. This is the work of Prof. James Z. Wang of Penn State University, entitled SIMPLIcity. Prof. Wang, a major collaborator of CMNet, is responsible for the technical work related to the image retrieval research of this project, under the National Science Foundation/ Information Technology Research project, (NSF/IIS-0219272). Prof. Wang can be contacted at jwang @ ist.psu.edu. Click here for most recent article on this collaborative effort.

CMNet is a model for further global digital image library development. For this reason, our current effort has gone far beyond the "Chinese" area. It has been expanded to cover the "memory" of the globe. For this reason, CMNet will be a part of the Global Memory Net. Our latest addition is Project Restore, an exciting collaboration between Prof. Chen and Prof. Piero Baglioni (baglioni @ apple.csgi.unifi.it) of the University of Florence, who is widely known for his restoration on the works of art using nanoparticle technology. Those pre- and post-restoration images and descriptive information are invaluable to many.