Archives, Special Collections and Data Platforms

Trying to verify some piece of HKUST lore and not sure where to start? The answer is usually tucked away in one of four drawers: the University Archives documenting the institution's own history, the Special Collections known for their antique maps, the digital platforms that put paper holdings online, and the institutional repository and databases that carry the University's research output and data. This article unpacks each of these four layers in turn — what they hold, how much, and how to search them — and clears up a common misconception along the way: whether HKUST actually maintains a research-data platform open to the public.

# 1. What does the University Archives hold, and how much?

The University Archives in the HKUST Library wasestablished in 1996, stemming from a mandate by founding president Prof. Chia-Wei Woo^※, and serves as the official custodian of the University's entire historical record — barely five years after HKUST opened its doors in 1991, meaning the University began documenting itself while it was still in its infancy. For more on Woo and the founding story, see Founding President Chia-Wei Woo and The History of the University.

The Archives' task is to collect, preserve, manage and make available university records of permanent value, covering legally significant documents as well as materials important to HKUST's history and its regional impact. According to official HKUST Library figures, the Archives currentlyholds more than 1,200 linear feet of archival material and collections^※ (linear feet being the standard Anglo-American archival measure of shelf space occupied by records), organised by type into:

• Internal administrative records and correspondence
• Publications, newsletters and press releases
• Architectural drawings and planning documents
• Historical photographs and audio-visual materials
• Public video footage
• Memorabilia, mementoes and historical artefacts (artifacts and ephemera)

Not all of this material is available at once. Under theUniversity Archives' access policy^※, holdings are divided into open records and closed records: open records can be consulted directly in the reading room; closed records require approval from the originating office and processing time^※ before they can be viewed, and some restricted digital materials additionally require a University login. This tiered access is standard practice for university archives — it preserves the full record while setting reasonable thresholds for material touching on personal privacy, personnel matters or as-yet-unreleased administrative business.

The qualifier "permanent value" is what separates an archive from an ordinary warehouse. A university generates a torrent of paperwork every day, but the Archives does not take everything in; through a process of appraisal it retains only what has long-term legal, administrative or historical significance — constitutions and regulations, Council and executive documents, records of major ceremonies and construction, official publications and the like — while routine administrative correspondence may never make it into the stacks. "1,200 linear feet" is therefore not a static figure: as the University keeps operating, new records meeting the bar continue to be accessioned and the collection grows year on year. For anyone verifying the University's history, this also means the Archives is a living institution — today's major administrative decisions are tomorrow's archive.

# How do I book a reading session?

Reading-room services require an appointment. Readers can call 2358 6785, or book directly with the Library Archives and Special Collections department (LBARSC for short; email [email protected]), and gain entry to the University Archives reading room on the first floor of the Library (the Ko Pui Shuen Gallery) with valid identification. Most digitised records are already searchable online; on-site appointments are mainly for originals and undigitised files.

# 2. Why are the Special Collections known for "Chinese antique maps"?

If the Archives documents HKUST itself, the Special Collections preserve a much broader swath of history. Witha geographic focus on China and its neighbouring regions^※, these holdings are, in the Library's own description, among the most representative collections of antique maps and rare books held by any East Asian university^※. How does a young university founded on science and engineering, open only since 1991, come to hold such a body of humanities classics? The answer lies in years of deliberate acquisition and donation by the Library, gradually gathering scattered modern-Chinese historical materials into a coherent system.

According to the classification used in the Rare & Special e-Zone, the core of the Special Collections divides into:

Beyond these categories, the Special Collections also hold a number of named collections, most acquired through donation or en bloc purchase: the James Lee Collection, the Paul Lin and Soong Ching-ling Correspondence, Paul T.K. Lin's Hsinhua Photo Collection, and the Walter R. Kent Collection^※, to name a few. These named collections bring private archives, correspondence and images into the public domain of scholarship, offering primary sources for the study of modern Chinese history, the history of photography and China's exchanges with the wider world.

Antique maps have become the Special Collections' signature in part because of their documentary density: the period from the late Qing to 1949 was one of dramatic change in China's frontiers, administrative divisions and urban landscapes, and maps of the same region from different years, set side by side, amount to a visual history of the modern era in themselves. These originals are sensitive to temperature, humidity and light, so day-to-day consultation is mostly done through digital images; viewing the originals requires a separate appointment.

# How a batch of photographs came to the Library: the provenance of the Sha Fei Collection

Of the named collections, the Sha Fei Photographic Collection best illustrates how the Special Collections "grow". Sha Fei (1912–1950) was one of the most influential photojournalists in China in the 1930s and 1940s; according to HKUST Library materials, he left behind more than a thousand war photographs taken during the War of Resistance^※, images combining humanist concern with documentary power. Sha Fei's work largely sank into obscurity after his death and was only rediscovered in the 1980s, thanks in no small part to the efforts of his daughter Wang Yan. According to the Library, Wang Yan donated 63 museum-grade original prints to the HKUST Library's Special Collections^※, forming the Sha Fei Collection as it exists today.

The photographs did not stay in storage. The Library built a digital humanities project on them, "Sha Fei and Wartime Photography", putting frame-by-frame images online alongside location, date and captions for public searching; the Library has also staged a dedicated exhibition, "Sha Fei: A Humanist Photographer in War (1912–1950)". A set of privately donated originals, through digitisation, cataloguing and curation, has become publicly searchable primary material — which is precisely what distinguishes a special collection from an ordinary library shelf: it systematises scattered fragments of history and gives them back to the public.

# 3. What have the digital platforms put online?

The HKUST Library runs several digital platforms that push the Archives and Special Collections out of the reading room and onto the public web, most browsable without any University login. Coverage and time spans differ from platform to platform; their division of labour is as follows:

A few of those time spans are worth noting. The Digital Images collection mainly covers early campus images from 1988 to 1999 — in 1988 HKUST was still under construction, so these photographs preserve a visual record of the Clear Water Bay campus from building site to opening day. News Clippings Online covers newspaper and magazine coverage of HKUST from October 1996 onward; earlier clippings (the Media Review and related hard-copy clippings, 1992 to October 2001) are held in the University Archives^※, with full-text reading restricted to campus users. That dividing line is a useful reminder for researchers: media reports from before October 1996 must be consulted on paper back in the Archives.

# Can I read the full text of theses?

The University Theses collection holds the dissertations of HKUST doctoral and master's students. According to the Library's electronic-theses database notes, full-text images of theses are open to the world, except for unpublished theses whose full text is restricted to authorised HKUST users, unless the author has set further limits^※. In practice, that means an outside reader can usually read a HKUST doctoral thesis in full; the exceptions are theses placed under embargo (embargo) for patent, publication or author-requested reasons, which must wait until the restriction lifts. The Library also subscribes to external databases such as ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, extending the search to theses from universities worldwide. A thesis is at once a piece of research output and a vehicle for research methods and raw data, and is often the best entry point for tracing the early version of a particular result.

# 4. Where do research output and research data live?

The Archives and Special Collections preserve the "past", but the papers, datasets and theses HKUST produces every year are carried by a separate institutional infrastructure. This layer has long been overlooked from outside, yet it is the key to answering the question "Does HKUST have an open data platform?"

The HKUST SPD Institutional Repository is managed by Library professionals and is responsible for capturing, preserving and opening up the research output of HKUST researchers; deposited items are indexed and made freely available online. It also serves funders' open-access requirements: according to the Library's open-access guide, senior University leadership has adopted a policy requiring researchers to deposit the "author accepted manuscript" (AAM) into SPD within six months of publication^※, in line with the open-access mandates of the Research Grants Council (RGC). In other words, even if the final published version of a publicly funded HKUST paper sits behind a paywall, its accepted manuscript should be freely obtainable through SPD.

This requirement is not merely on paper. According to Library material, since 29 July 2021 all academic staff have been required to deposit the final accepted manuscript of their research output in the institutional repository^※, with particular emphasis on RGC-funded projects approved in 2010 or later. Beyond the RGC, the guide also lists the rules of other funders the University works with — the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)'s 12-month deposit window, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF)'s 12-month public-access requirement. This route is what is known as green open access: authors do not pay the journal extra to make their article open; they simply deposit the accepted manuscript in the institutional repository. The parallel gold open access route is opened on the journal side, usually for an article processing charge (APC); the HKUST Library, through transformative agreements with publishers and similar arrangements, secures APC discounts for the University's authors. Before depositing, researchers must still check the publisher's copyright terms to confirm the accepted manuscript may be made public, as some journals impose an embargo.

DataSpace@HKUST, meanwhile, is dedicated to research data. According to Library material, the platform waslaunched in 2017 for HKUST faculty and research postgraduate students to store, share, organise, preserve and publish research data^※. Its technical profile is independently registered in the third-party registry re3data: the platform is built on Dataverse (the open-source system developed by Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science) and, at the time of registration, held 43 dataverses and 129 datasets^※, using DataCite and Dublin Core metadata standards and offering a REST API for programmatic access. Functionally, every published dataset receives a permanent DOI and a standard citation format, and supports three tiers of access control — open, embargoed and restricted — so researchers can decide whether their data goes public immediately, after a delay, or only to named individuals.

DataSpace's design is aligned with the FAIR data principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The permanent DOI addresses "findable" and "accessible"; standardised metadata built on Dublin Core and DataCite structures addresses "interoperable"; and standard citation formats plus versioning address "reusable". For researchers there is also a practical payoff to depositing in DataSpace: modern journals increasingly demand a "data availability statement" alongside papers, and a public dataset with a DOI satisfies exactly that requirement — while generating trackable data-citation counts.

Supporting all this is the DMPTool@HKUST, a data-management-planning tool that helps researchers plan the collection, storage, sharing and long-term preservation of data from the project-design stage; for fields requiring large external datasets, the Library also brings in commercial data platforms on an ad-hoc basis (such as time-limited open resources from IEEE DataPort). SPD manages output, DataSpace manages data, DMPTool manages planning — together the three form HKUST's research-data governance chain. These platforms carry the verifiable underpinnings behind landmark research discoveries: the accepted manuscripts of papers and the data that supports them. It is also worth noting that DataSpace's REST API means it is not just for browsing — it can be called programmatically in bulk, plugging it into larger data infrastructure.

# 5. A common misconception, cleared up

There is a persistent word around that "HKUST has no research-data platform open to the public." As a matter of fact, that statement is no longer accurate: DataSpace@HKUST is exactly such a platform, and it has been running for years, wired into the international data-citation infrastructure (DOI, DataCite). A more accurate characterisation would be:

• HKUST does have a general-purpose research database for its own research community (DataSpace@HKUST); anyone can search and view its public datasets online, but deposit is restricted to University members;
• HKUST does have an institutional repository (SPD) making accepted manuscripts open, under the RGC open-access policy;
• HKUST currently does not have a single, public-facing, large-scale disciplinary data centre (for example, a comprehensive open raw-data repository for a large physics experiment, or a dedicated bioinformatics data hub) — such big-science data is generally released through international disciplinary infrastructure (public repositories in each field, preprint platforms such as arXiv, journal supplements), rather than through a central repository run by the University itself.

So the usual route for verifying the data behind a piece of HKUST research is: search DataSpace@HKUST or SPD first, then follow the paper's data availability statement to the relevant disciplinary database. Where resources and policies change, the latest announcements from the HKUST Library and the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Development should take precedence.

# 6. Commercial and subscribed databases

Alongside its own platforms, the HKUST Library also subscribes to a wide range of commercial and open academic databases spanning the natural sciences, engineering, business, the social sciences and the humanities, for faculty and students searching literature and data. According to the Library's published annual statistics, the number of subscribed databases grew from 333 in 2020/21 to 379 in 2024/25^※. These are subscription resources, mostly requiring University credentials or on-campus network access, and thus differ in openness from the publicly accessible archives, special collections and institutional repository described above.

# Related reading

• Founding President Chia-Wei Woo — the founding president whose mandate established the University Archives
• The History of the University — the very history the Archives records
• Founding and Naming — the preparatory period captured in early archives and images
• Landmark Research Discoveries — whose accepted manuscripts and data live in SPD and DataSpace