Visitors view ancient documents at Tianyige Museum. Photo: Courtesy of Tianyige Museum

Huang Gang is in his fifties. Every day, he sits before a computer screen at Tianyige Museum (Tianyige), flipping through ancient books - digitally.

As director of the information technology department at Tianyige Museum in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang Province, home to Asia's oldest surviving private library and one of the world's three oldest remaining family-run libraries, his job title may seem far removed from old books. Yet his work centers on them: converting brittle, thread-bound antique volumes into searchable, zoomable digital files accessible on screen.

For years, Tianyige has carried out digitization in batches guided by its mission: rescue-oriented preservation, scholarly organization and public-oriented outreach. Its teams have scanned more than 3.4 million pages of ancient texts. The institution rolled out its Ancient‑Book Digital Service Platform back in 2009. By 2025, the platform had drawn over 4.6 million total visits.

To outsiders, this might look like a headlong rush into digitization. For Huang and his colleagues, it is delicate work balanced between fast‑evolving artificial intelligence models and the reverence owed to fragile paper relics. "Technology is a tool, ancient books are artifacts, and reading is the ultimate purpose," Huang told the Global Times.

Huang Gang, director of the information technology department of Tianyige Museum, works on the digitization of ancient books. Photo: Courtesy of Tianyige Museum

Beyond tech boundaries

Deep in the storage vaults of Tianyige, tens of thousands of ancient volumes rest in silence. Some pages are curled and fragile; others bear faded script -the accumulated marks of centuries. Vulnerable to aging, wear and external damage, these precious paper relics can hardly sustain long-term repeated manual consultation, making digital preservation an indispensable way to inherit ancient book resources. 

Huang's daily work involves leading his team in the digitization of the library's entire collection of ancient books, paintings and cultural relics, bringing rare treasures out of the shadows and into public view.

AI now serves as a core auxiliary tool for ancient-book digitization and research. Huang's group initially built character-recognition frameworks based on optical-character-recognition technology. By cross-checking outputs across different models, ancient Chinese characters, damaged script and blurry handwriting.

According to Zhejiang Daily, by August 2025, the Tianyige's digital platform had added over 3,700 new digitized book sets, lifting its total digital holdings past 20,000 volumes. 

Digitization is never  a purely technical exercise;  in-depth scholarly expertise in ancient texts remains indispensable. Huang frequently collaborates with Zhao Xuteng, a museum librarian specializing in classical literature. Zhao is responsible for selecting which volumes to digitize, evaluating editions, studying content, and identifying works of significant academic or public value. While one team focuses on the technical execution, another digs deep into the textual substance, ensuring that cold digital capture remains faithful to the historical and bibliographic logic of the originals.

A staff member of Tianyige Museum view digital resources of ancient documens in the museum's ancient?book reading room, on August 18, 2026. Photo: Lin Xiaoyi/GT

Staying true to  reading

When he is not writing code, Huang keeps asking one fundamental question: What should technology actually do for people? "All technology ultimately serves the act of reading itself," he said. "It can never replace that."

With the rapid rise of large language models, demand for high-quality text corpora has surged. Overseas, some AI companies have reportedly purchased millions of printed books in bulk, scanned them and then shredded the originals. 

"Machines can efficiently compile documents, retrieve sources and generate explanatory notes. Real engagement with ancient texts, however, is far more than mechanical assembly of characters," Huang noted.

Both Huang and Zhao stressed that human beings sit at the heart of cultural inheritance. People absorb wisdom from old texts, draw on personal experience and scholarship to reflect, and produce new knowledge - an intellectual process no AI can fully replicate.

The Global Times learned that every digitization workflow at Tianyige follows strict closed-loop protocols: collection checkout logging, noncontact scanning, AI-powered quality checks, precise image stitching and compliant online publication. The full procedure minimizes physical wear on original artifacts.

"A book is, first and foremost, a cultural relic that carries a thousand-year legacy," Huang said. "Only secondarily is it a text to be read." That principle, he added, is shared by all guardians at Tianyige.

"Media change, technologies evolve, but the essence of reading has never changed," he stressed.

Today, drawing on its comprehensive digital collections, Tianyige hosts monthly exhibitions of rare texts and organizes family reading events where parents and children explore the classics together. For Huang and his colleagues, the most gratifying reward is watching more and more ordinary people develop a love for ancient reading and a deeper appreciation for the traditional Chinese culture.

In an era swept by artificial intelligence, Tianyige's guardians tend to fragile paper relics while leveraging modern technology, preserving the genuine power of reading. More than 450 years of scholarly heritage flows onward, passing between human fingertips and glowing digital screens.