Ancient hook catalogs record and classify a large number of Chinese ancient books. They are of great academic value for studying both ancient literature and traditional knowledge organization. The development of digital scholarship shed new light on the digital preservation and reuse of these ancient book catalogs as well as the domain research supported by digital tools. Digital scholarship facilitates the digitization and datafication of ancient hook catalogs. Morcover, new methods and computational tools are provided to enable the exploration of large collections, and new research questions can be raised from fresh perspeetives Recent studies have introduced computational methods to analyze the abstracts and classification systems of the ancient book catalogs. But these studies were based on only one catalog or a particular category. 1t is imperative to integrate the catalogs throughout the history and provide digital ools for scholars to explore and analyze them diachronically and holistically.

  In this study., we selected eight representative catalogs, mostly from official histories. u sources. They were Hanshu Yiwenchi, Suishu Jingjizhi, Jivtangshu Jingjizhi, Xintangshu Yiwenzhi, Songshi Viwenzhi, Mingshi Viwenzhi, Qingshigao Yiwenzhi and Siku Quanshu Zongmu. These catalogs cover major dynasties in Chinese history with a time span of more than two thousand years. We adopted a semi-automated data processing approach to integrate the book entries in eight catalogs. The whole integration process was iterated by machine pre-processing and expert manual correetion and contained three main steps—record splitting and field segmentation, field completion and nomnalization and hook identification. Exentually we got more than 110 000 structured data records, and identified over 7 000 books that were recorded in at least two catalogs.

  Based on the integrated data, we designed and developed an interactive visual analysis system that included features of statistics, visualization and recon] query. The system is designed to mainly meet two research requirements proposed by expert users. First, the system provides granular statistics and graphs that can help scholars to compare and trace the change of hook volumes in different categories and catalogs. Second, it provides an interactive visualization tool that can be used to explore how different books are classified differently in cach catalog, and thus manifests the changes of knowledge organization as well as the origin and evolution of academic thoughis.

  In conclusion, this study provides data foundation and analytic tools for the studies of ancient hook catalogs in the context of digital scholarship. which not only saves the effort on manual data collection and collation, but also provides new perspeetives to identify and solve hemencutics problems with new techniques. 8 figs. 3 tabs. 36 refs.