Success stories: case studies
Columbia University, Ling Lung Serials

Columbia University’s Starr East Asian Library is the only known library outside of China to have a nearly complete run of Ling Lung, a women’s magazine published in Shanghai in the 1930s. This pocket-sized weekly magazine portrays women’s fashion and lifestyle, and contains pictures and stories of American movie stars. Ling Lung provides a unique snapshot of women’s changing roles in society more than a half century ago. Starr staff selected the material, developed funding and advised on various issues.

In microfilming and digitizing Ling Lung, Columbia realized two goals: to create a preservation surrogate of the volumes and to provide the magazine online to interested readers all over the world.

Preservation Resources both filmed and digitized Ling Lung. The quality assurance of both processes was done by staff with Chinese language ability. This skill was vital in the arrangement of digital files for the online presentation. After filming was completed, the print master was scanned to create 600 dpi bitonal TIFFs. The images were processed to remove skew and minimize bleedthrough that was present in the original printed text. Files were named according to issue and year. With data gathered by Preservation Resources during post scan processing relating the structure of the serial to the image files, Academic Information Services at Columbia was able to cost-effectively create access and display page for Ling Lung programmatically.

More information about the project and the complete online edition of the magazine can be viewed at http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/linglung/.