ISSN: 2474-3542 Journal homepage: http://journal.calaijol.org 

 

Partnering with Special Collections in Promoting Digital 

Humanities: Papers of Charles Daniel Tenney (丁家立档案
) at Dartmouth College 
 

Nien Lin Xie 

 

Abstract: 

This paper discusses a project relating to the papers of Charles Tenney at Dartmouth 

College in order to examine the value of partnering with special collections while 

promoting digital humanities. It treats the discovery, digitization, publication and 

utilization of rare and unique primary resources in assisting classroom teaching and 

research. This project provides a case study that illustrates how, by creating collaborative 

projects with faculty and colleagues, librarians can create knowledge, enrich scholarship, 

and better serve academic communities as research partners instead of being mere content 

providers. 

 

To cite this article: 

Xie, N.L. (2019). Partnering with Special Collections in Promoting Digital Humanities: 

Papers of Charles Daniel Tenney (丁家立档案) at Dartmouth College. International 
Journal of Librarianship, 4(1), 103-107. 

 

To submit your article to this journal:  

Go to http://ojs.calaijol.org/index.php/ijol/about/submissions 
 

http://ojs.calaijol.org/index.php/ijol/about/submissions


INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LIBRARIANSHIP, 4(1), 103-107 

ISSN: 2474-3542 
 

Partnering with Special Collections in Promoting Digital 

Humanities: 

Papers of Charles Daniel Tenney (丁家立档案) at Dartmouth 
College1 

Nien Lin Xie 

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA 

ABSTRACT 

This paper discusses a project relating to the papers of Charles Tenney at Dartmouth College in 

order to examine the value of partnering with special collections while promoting digital 

humanities. It treats the discovery, digitization, publication and utilization of rare and unique 

primary resources in assisting classroom teaching and research. This project provides a case study 

that illustrates how, by creating collaborative projects with faculty and colleagues, librarians can 

create knowledge, enrich scholarship, and better serve academic communities as research partners 

instead of being mere content providers. 

 

Keywords: Charles Daniel Tenney; Education in China; Digital humanities; Special collections 

INTRODUCTION 

In today’s academic library world, special collections are playing a larger role than ever before. 

While both print and electronic resources can be purchased, subscribed to and often shared among 

libraries, unique and rare materials can only be found in special collections at individual 

institutions. Until recently, the only means to access materials in such special collections was to 

travel to the locations and use them on site. Implementation of open access policies and 

development of digitization technology have paved the way for the discovery and utilization of a 

great number of these resources in recent years. The project of Charles Tenney’s papers that I 

conducted at Dartmouth College Library in 2012 is a case in point. 

 Charles Tenney was an American educator and diplomat. He played a pivotal role in 

pioneering China’s modern educational system and was a well-known person in the history of US-

China relations during the 19th century. In this paper, I introduce Tenney’s papers’ project from 

                                                 
1 Early version presented at the 9th Shanghai International Library Forum and published in the conference 

proceedings as follows: Nien Lin Xie (2018). Partnering with Special Collections in Promoting Digital Humanities: 

Papers of Charles Daniel Tenney (丁家立档案) at Dartmouth. In Proceedings of Shanghai International Library 

Forum (SILF), October 18-19, 2018, Shanghai, China. 



Xie / International Journal of Librarianship 4(1)                                               104 

the initial discovery to its digitization and transcription, online publication, and to a further 

collaborative project of translation and scholarship that finally led to the making of the book Ding 

Jiali dang an = The Papers of Charles Daniel Tenney (丁家立档案). I also explain how we 
integrated the resource with classroom teaching and standardized it as a paper assignment for a 

history class at Dartmouth, “History of Modern China since 1800” taught by Professor Pamela 

Crossley in the History Department. This instance demonstrates that by exploring hidden treasures 

at special collections and making them available to classrooms and the wider world, we can 

increase the value and extend the impact of rare resources, “using the past to serve the present” as 

a Chinese saying goes. We can also create new knowledge and scholarship by adding new contents 

through publication. I would further argue that librarians can better serve our academic institutions 

by being research partners rather than merely being content providers.  

CHARLES DANIEL TENNEY AND HIS PAPERS 

Nestled in the picturesque New England town of Hanover where Dartmouth College is situated, 

Rauner Specials Collections Library has been a treasure house of extraordinary rare books, 

manuscripts and archival materials. It houses the first of edition of The Book of Mormon, William 

Shakespeare’s First Folio, the original version of Dickens’ David Copperfield, The Robert Frost 

Papers, one of the largest and most important collections of Robert Frost works and Collection of 

George Washington’s Papers, just to name a few. One largely unknown item in the collection is 

the first edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung published in 1964 in two volumes, 

one for the cadres and one for the rank and files. The head of Rauner Library, Jay Satterfield, once 

said that he bought the little red book for Dartmouth students to gain a glimpse to the most sold 

book in the world. To best assist campus teachings, Rauner Library is equipped with classrooms, 

scanners and cameras. Professors and students have direct access to all the materials which they 

can touch, flip through and examine with bare hands. I have personally taught classes there using 

books and artifacts in the collection. 

 Among Rauner Library’s treasured items is, one particularly interesting folder, the Papers 

of Charles Daniel Tenney. Graduated from Dartmouth in 1878, Tenney went to China as a 

missionary in 1882, and moved to Tianjin after three years to focus on elite education. In 1886, 

Tenney organized the Anglo-Chinese school, and shortly after, his insight in modern education 

caught the attention of Viceroy Li Hongzhang, the most powerful man in China at the time. Li 

invited him to be a tutor for his own children at home. 

 In 1895, Tenney was appointed by Sheng Xuanhuai, Li Hongzhang’s chief economic 

deputy and the Minister of Transportation of the Qing Dynasty, to be the President of Beiyang 

University, the first comprehensive Western style university in China and the predecessor of 

Tianjin University. He held that position for eleven years. Education at Beiyang University was 

interrupted as a result of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, and Tianjin was occupied by foreign troops 

and a provisional government for the district was set up. From 1900 to 1902, Tenney served as 

Chinese Secretary of the Tianjin Provisional Government. 

 In 1902 Tenney made a trip to Berlin to take up with the German Government the question 

of compensation for the incorporation in the German Concession at Tientsin (Tianjin) of the 

original site of Peiyang (Beiyang) University. He was successful in obtaining an indemnity for the 



Xie / International Journal of Librarianship 4(1)                                               105 

seized property, thereby enabling the University to erect new buildings at Hsiku in the north 

suburbs. (“Dartmouth College Library Guide”, n.d.) 

 In 1906 Dr. Tenney retired as President of Peiyang (Beiyang) University and was appointed 

Director of Chinese Government students in the United States, in which capacity he remained until 

1908, making his headquarters at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He brought with him to the United 

States for further study about thirty members of the Senior Class of Peiyang (Beiyang) University. 

On March 2, 1907 Tenney returned to Dartmouth as the director of Chinese government students. 

He had trained over fifty percent of the more than one hundred Chinese students who had enrolled 

in graduate programs at Ivy League institutions and MIT between 1901 and 1907. Many notable 

alumni from his university eventually took leading positions in various fields in China and played 

important roles in modern Chinese history. (“Dartmouth College Library Guide”, n.d.) 

 Tenney’s papers contain seven essays and a speech, consisting of partially typed texts and 

a partially handwritten manuscript. The essays are believed to be written between 1907 to 1925, 

after his career as the president of Beiyang University. Biographical in nature, they touch on 

China’s educational reform, cultural values, religious history, the Republic of China, the 

modernization of Chinese language, and Viceroy Li Hongzhang. The folder also includes Tenney's 

English translation of two Kaifeng temple stones, as well as a chapter on Kaifeng Synagogue and 

Kaifeng Jews community. It is worth mentioning that Kaifeng Synagogue in the City of Kaifeng 

in Henan Province was the home of the only Jewish synagogue in China before it was burned down 

in 1860s.  Tenney’s vivid travel account to the site and his detailed description of the two stele 

monuments are valuable first-hand eyewitness to the history of Jewish community in Kaifeng.  All 

in all, the papers were so eloquently written that they do not only acutely reflect Tenney’s keen 

interests in China affairs, but also reveal his passion and longing to China’s success. 

THE DIGITIZATION PROJECT 

The papers first came to Professor Crossley’s attention when a visiting researcher from Princeton 

University came to Dartmouth to use them. Later, she introduced them to Niu Guanjie, a history 

professor from Renmin University of China and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth in 2007, whose 

research interest was in US-China relations in late 19th century. In 2010, the year after I became 

the East Asian Librarian at Dartmouth, I began to think how wonderful it would be to have the 

papers digitally available as online primary sources, accessible to classrooms on campus and all. 

My recognition was partly in response to the library call to propose digitization projects at that 

moment and partly a result of conversations with Professor Crossley. By then, Tenney’s papers 

had been lying at Rauner Library for over 70 years.  

 In the spring of 2012, I proposed to the library administration to have the papers digitized. 

The immediate driving force at the time was to have them published on the college website for 

Crossley’s history class in the fall term. The proposal was accepted almost instantly, and a project 

team was formed. Some torn pages were repaired by the preservation department; the papers were 

scanned by the digital production team and converted to machine-readable text using optical 

character recognition. TEI markup was applied in the cataloging department, encoding the texts 

and making them keyword-searchable. TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, which develops 

and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form (https://tei-c.org). In October 

https://tei-c.org/


Xie / International Journal of Librarianship 4(1)                                               106 

2012, the papers came alive as an open access online resource, just in time for the class. Since 

then, they have become a standard class paper assignment. Professor Crossley requires her students 

to use the papers as the basis of a research exercise, exploring topics as various as the family 

attitudes of Li Hongzhang, the origins of the modern transliteration system for Chinese, and the 

Jewish monuments in Kaifeng. In evaluating the project, Crossley expressed the importance of the 

online access of the original materials for students in historical research and in understanding the 

period of China from 1882 to 1920, a critical historical moment in Chinese history. (Crossley, 

2013) 

 Inspired by the compelling richness of the papers, my colleague at Binghamton University, 

Julie Wang and I explored the possibility of further scholarship with Tenney’s project. We asked 

ourselves: Wouldn’t a translation into Chinese be useful to scholars of history at Tianjin 

University? To those who can only read Chinese? Wouldn’t further research be meaningful to this 

scarcely studied yet influential historical figure in contemporary Chinese education?   

 In 2013, at the annual meeting of the Society of Chinese studies librarians, Julie and I 

presented Tenney’s project. The head of Guangxi Normal University Press, He Linxia, approached 

us to express his interest in publishing a translated volume accompanied by scans of the original 

documents. Ding Ye, our colleague from Georgetown University, agreed to join us in the 

translation. We invited Professor Crossley to write an essay “Charles Tenney’s Remnants of a 

Foreign Life in China” which served as the introduction of the book. We incorporated an address 

that Tenney delivered to Dartmouth students in 1907: “Educational reform in China”. We added a 

chronology and a bibliography of Tenney that Julie Wang compiled. We also included an academic 

article by Professor Niu Guanjie. Our book was published in 2015.  

CONCLUSION 

Based upon my experience of the Tenney’s papers project, I offer the following in closing: 

1. Develop projects aligned with libraries’ strategic planning. As librarianship embraces rapid 
transformation and development with new modes of teaching, researching and publishing, 

it is central to librarians to stay adaptive and focused to adjust to ebb and flow. By following 

this principle, one can obtain a library administration’s support, which is the first step 

towards any successful projects. When I became the East Asian librarian nine years ago, 

my primary responsibility was still largely based on physical collection, although it was 

already shifting towards licensed electronic resources. We then evolved into the era of 

internet when vast amount of information became easily available with everything 

connected by network. As digital humanities gradually gained momentum, we have 

embarked on projects of digitization, open access publishing and cross border 

collaborations while advancing into computerized data manipulation.  

2. Collaboration, collaboration and collaboration. As many East Asian librarians in American 
academic institutions are solo librarians responsible for Chinese, Japanese and Korean 

collections, it is imperative to keep the team work spirit alive. In Tenney’s papers project, 

for content, I had the moral and intellectual support from our faculty on campus and 

librarian colleagues from other institutions; For technological support, a steady work flow 



Xie / International Journal of Librarianship 4(1)                                               107 

between preservation, cataloging, digital production team and Rauner Special Collections 

Library enabled a smooth advancement from stage to stage; for the publication, the book 

would not have come out in time to be used for Crossley’s history class had it not been to 

the diligent, excellent proof reading and editing skills demonstrated by our editor at 

Guangxi Normal University Press. 

3. Dare to enter uncharted waters. The expansion of digital technology in academic libraries 
lead to exploration of innovative ideas and new design possibilities unknown before. By 

actively engaging in these explorations, librarians can stretch their imagination, develop 

their potentials and create collections of originality that combines ideas with technology. 

Since the completion of the Tenney’s project, I have undertaken a new collection on the 

“Up to the Mountains and down to the Countryside Movement” in the 60s and 70s. So far, 

I have collected over 1,500 pages of diaries, manuscripts, photos and artifacts for the 

library. At the same time, we have also conducted over twenty hours of oral history video 

recordings. I envision that the library will produce a multifaceted online resource that 

incorporates an image collection, an interactive searchable text collection, and an oral 

history video collection, all presented on a single platform. Although Dartmouth College 

Library hasn’t yet experimented with a production of this nature, the initial scanning and 

metadata of the materials have been completed and related departments have shown an 

increased curiosity and interest in working on this ongoing project towards our goal. 

 Moving forward, opportunities for digital humanities are abundant with positions of digital 

humanities librarians and digital humanities centers created at many institutions accompanied by 

new tools and technologies. Librarians will continue to play a key role in the future development. 

We will work collaboratively to increase our specialized digital collections, promote scholarly 

online publication, create projects of web archiving on topics of common interest, engage in text 

mining and analytics to assist scholars, and we will further explore for the best model of digital 

humanities. 

 

References 

Crossley, P. K. Personal correspondence, December 18, 2013. 

Dartmouth College Library Guide to the Papers of Charles D. Tenney, circa 1919 – 1986. 

Retrieved April 23, 2018, from http://ead.dartmouth.edu/html/ms794_fullguide.html 

 

About the author 

Nien Lin Xie is the Librarian for East Asian Studies at Dartmouth College Library. 

 

http://ead.dartmouth.edu/html/ms794_fullguide.html

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